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.

Death and its representations

Only twice have I been in the same room as death. The first time was when my grandfather died, peacefully in a hospital bed. The second time was when a drug addict died of an overdose at a cinema where I was working. There was nothing peaceful about that, or the failed effort to bring him back to life.

On film on the other hand death is a constant presence, and many have perhaps only experienced death through seeing it in moving images (in the news or in fiction). It is a peculiar thing. Does it teach us anything? Does it make us more prepared for when we too will encounter it? For children, experiencing death on film might be very traumatic and perhaps therapeutic. I worked as a projectionist when The Lion King came out and I used to go into the screening room at the moment when Simba's dad is killed. I did it because it was so moving listening to the children. There were two kinds, those who had seen it before and started whispering about how the dad would die soon, and those who had not seen it before and were very concerned. The tension in the room was palpable, 100 kids shifting in their seats, holding their breaths.

"We live - as we dream - alone." wrote Joseph Conrad, and we die alone too he might have added. We might reach out for a hand to hold in our last moment, as in the very end of Heat, but that is not the same. Or we might be embalmed in a light from above, as in so many death scenes in the films of Ingmar Bergman. A peaceful and benevolent light, but one which also emphasis the loneliness of the deceased, the only body in the light. But Carol in Wyler's Mrs. Miniver had neither a hand nor a light to sooth her, instead she died by herself on a cold wooden floor.

Death was of course of special significance for Bergman, who made several films about it, and even had Death appear in person. The first of his films with an embodied figure of Death was Summer Interlude (1951) and it was not the last. Death is usually seen as something tragic, but it does not have to be. In several of Bergman's films death is a relief, a victory even. When the pain is too strong, when life brings nothing but misery, dying is not necessarily a bad option. The saying "Every day above ground is a good day." (which I have seen motivational speakers sometimes use) seems to me to be putting the bar terribly low. And only because somebody has died does not mean that they are necessarily gone. Ugetsu Monogatari suggests different ways in which the dead might remain. As ghosts, or hallucinations, or voices.

It is not easy to know how one will react, or should react, when somebody dies. It is easy for others to judge those that show no outward signs of grief and sadness, but that is very unfair. Everybody reacts differently, and nobody else can know what goes on inside another person. They might not even know themselves. Little Eddie, in The Courtship of Eddie's Father, is concerned about not feeling enough about his mother being dead, he is afraid he will forget about her. Then one day he finds his goldfish dead in its bowl, and then he reacts. He reacts with a combination of shock and fierce grief that is unbearable, and one of the most moving death scenes in all of cinema.

Sometimes death is sudden, swift and merciful. In Superman Jonathan Kent is walking on his farm when suddenly he has a heart attack. "Oh no." he says, and then he dies. Sometimes it is the opposite. In Black Hawk Down one of the rangers is slowly bleeding to death while his comrades are desperately trying to save him, in a scene which is long, messy and incredibly intense. I hardly ever cry when watching films but that scene has an unusual effect on me. It is not just that he dies, but how. The terror, fear and panic, together with the visceral close-ups of blood, tissue and bone, makes the sequence overwhelming. That is not how you want to die.

To die with dignity can be of great importance to some, or to be left alone. When Judd dies in Ride the High Country he asks that the others stay away. "I don't want them to see me like this." he says. When he is alone he looks at the mountains, the last thing he sees is where he used to live. He died the way he had too, and even though he might have wanted to live on there was no place for him any longer and at least he died in a noble way. Ride the High Country was directed by Sam Peckinpah, for whom death was as important a subject as for Bergman. A particularly fine scene is this, from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, where an older couple, played by Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado, is helping a friend take care of some outlaws, with sad consequences.



Bob Dylan wrote the music for that film, and Colin Baker sits by the river, knocking on heaven's door. What happens next is unknown. But films provide many suggestions. In the wonderful After Life you end up in a transit area after you die and there you are asked to think of your favourite memory. When you have decided upon one, that memory will be recreated and you will be living it for the rest of eternity. All memories are different, it is a very personal thing, and for all the sweetness and wisdom in the film it is still the case that in the end we are alone.

What of the rest of us, those who have not died? The best we can do is grant our dying friend a last request, and then go into the other room and cry, as in Only Angels Have Wings, another great film on the subject of death. But we must not stay in tears for too long. A message of the film, a very Hawksian message, is that the dead do not matter, it is us the living that matters. We who are left alive best honour the dead by go on living, continuing with our lives.

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Films mentioned:
The Lion King (Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff 1994)
Heat (Michael Mann 1995)
Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler 1942)
Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman 1951)
Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi 1953)
The Courtship of Eddie's Father (Vincente Minnelli 1963)
Superman (Richard Donner 1978)
Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott 2001)
Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah 1962)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah 1973)
After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda 1998)
Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks 1939)

I have not forgotten Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946), but I will write about it in full later this year.

The world after life in A Matter of Life and Death.

The Power and the Glory (1933)

It is not unusual that, when Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) is written about, The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard 1933) is mentioned as a possible inspiration. The earlier film is not widely seen but it is worth seeking out both because it is similar to Citizen Kane and because it is a good film in its own right. It is also Preston Sturges's first original screenplay and one of the first times Spencer Tracy plays a leading role, even though he is not as extraordinary good as he would later become, so it is a historically significant film.

It is about a man, Tom Garner, who works himself up from humble beginnings to become a powerful and wealthy man (he is in the railway business) but who alienate his family and dies alone. At the moment of his death he utters one single word. The film begins with the death and is then told in non-chronological flashbacks that take place on three planes, the rise from childhood, the fall, and the present day, and is quite intricate. So the connections with Citizen Kane are rather obvious. Welles though said (in This is Orson Welles) that he had not seen The Power and the Glory and since he was in general not shy of highlighting his inspirations he was probably telling the truth. But it is of course possible that Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-writer on Citizen Kane, had seen it.

The script was so advanced that a new word was coined in order to explain it, "narratage", a term that did not really catch on. It refers to the use of a complex flashback structure that is authored by a voice-over to help give a sense of order and continuity. The Power and the Glory was not the first film with a flashback structure, that was common enough, but it was pushing the concept further.

The person who tells the story is Tom's friend Henry, one of the few who actually liked Tom. But how does Henry know all these things? In one scene Tom asks Henry "Do you know?" Henry answers "No." and Tom replies "It's a secret." Yet Henry has told us about it, or rather, he is in fact telling us about it, so he does seem to know. Is he even to be trusted? There are many in the film who are deceitful after all. The most remarkable deception is when Tom's second wife becomes pregnant and it turns out that it is not Tom but Tom's son from his first marriage who is the father.

The cinematographer of The Power and the Glory is James Wong Howe and there are some striking deep focus shots (such as when Sally Garner decides to kill herself), and there is a fine visual connection between the beginning and the end, with lights beaming through the windows in the opening sequence (the funeral) and the scene at the end when Tom dies. Howe and the director William K. Howard did several films together and who was primarily responsible for the look of them is hard to say.

The director William K. Howard was listed under "Subjects for Further Research" in Andrew Sarris's American Cinema and he has not yet been properly research. But he has made a number of fine films, sometimes working with James Wong Howe, and he had style and force. An important early film is said to be White Gold (1927). Another is Transatlantic (1931) and then there is the inspired The Princess Comes Across (1936), where Carole Lombard plays an actress who pretends she is Olga of Sweden, whom she plays as if she was Greta Garbo. If ever there was a meta-performance...

The theme of The Power and the Glory is similar to Citizen Kane, and many other stories as well. It is perhaps one of the oldest of tales, how greed and ambition can ruin a person. On his deathbed Tom utters one word. The word is "Sally", his first wife and one true love. He lost her, and everything else that mattered.

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Here is an earlier post about Sturges. When Sturges directed his first film, The Great McGinty (1940), which he had also written, he was again telling the story of the rise and fall of a man through flashbacks. It is less complex and more light at heart, but a very good film.

Trains in art and motion

To complement an earlier post about trains (and to mentioned Richard Fleischer again), here is a fantastic shot from Violent Saturday (Fleischer 1955).

It is almost like an optical illusion, with the smoke not coming from the train yet looking like it does. The low angle of the camera captures the immense sky and the plains and hills and the pylons also help to make the image come alive, without being cluttered.

Just for good measure, here are two paintings from two key European artists that also signals the allure that trains have on the imagination of artists. The first is J.M.W. Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed from 1844.

One critic said that Turner had managed to paint "speed itself". You may not see it on this small image but there is a hare in front of the train, desperately trying to escape from it, a detail that gives added meaning and depth to the painting. 

The second example is by Claude Monet, who made a number of paintings with trains (as did other Impressionists as well, such as Camille Pissarro). 

This one is called Train in the Snow (or The Locomotive), from 1875, and is much less explosive than Turner's. There is no speed here but a moment of rest, which is more in line with Monet's sensibilities. It seems cold, only the headlights generate any heat or colour, but instead of feeling in any way threatening this train seems to be kind and inviting. 

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If you want to see the real paintings Turner's is to be found at the National Gallery in London (even there the hare is difficult to spot) and Monet's is at Musée Marmottan in Paris.

My 250th post

I began blogging in 2005, in Swedish under the name Filmforum. I kept that blog going until the middle of 2009 when I moved to Scotland. That is when I began this blog, Fredrik on film, because I felt that I should write in English instead. So Filmforum retired, after 260 posts, and the new blog took over. Today it celebrates its 250th post! I think that is cause for some celebration.

The first post I published was about Meet Me in St Louis (1944) and Vincente Minnelli. It was a short piece, a simple celebration of a favourite film (and filmmaker), and not one for posterity perhaps. Actually a lot of my posts in the first year or so were short and sometimes written more for the sake of writing than because I necessarily had anything I wanted to say.

But right from the start you can still see what my priorities have been. Swedish cinema, including Bergman, lesser known filmmakers, common myths and preconceptions about film history, and philosophical discussions about film and our engagement with films and film history. It is very satisfying to be able to write freely, without any interference, about the things that matter to you.

I intend to continue writing on the blog, at least for as long as I feel I have something to say and there are people out there that want to read about that something. I am very happy for the readers I have got, and to all those who have visited me so far I am very grateful. I hope I will be able to keep my present readers and perhaps even entice some new ones, and to develop this blog even more. We shall see what happens next!

And now some links, first the ten posts which has had the most visitors over the years:

Bergman's favourite films.
A few words about Tokyo Story (1953).
RIP Gunnar Fischer.
Henry Hathaway.
The deep focus conundrum.
A selection of Swedish films.
Maya Deren.
Some thoughts on Gilles Deleuze.
The Great Gatsby (2013).
Max Weber goes to the movies.

And here are ten posts that have not had as many visitors but that I particularly like:

About racism and Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown 1949).
About Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls 1948).
About game theory and The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941).
About "subtext creep".
About "cine-literacy".
About adaptations.
About the history of auteurs.
My second post in the series "Reading Bazin", this one about direct address and time.
About Hill Street Blues.
About the problems with comparing all films to Hollywood.