Personal Views by Wood Robin

Author:Wood, Robin [Wood, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: INscribe Digital
Published: 2006-03-17T05:00:00+00:00

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6. Since this was written, Amarcord (Fellini’s rich and affectionate evocation of the world of his own childhood) has demonstrated that one should never be hasty in abandoning hope for an artist who has once produced distinguished work.

8

Reflections on the Auteur Theory

The status of the “auteur theory” as theory has always been somewhat dubious. To Truffaut, who seems to have invented it for the cinema (it is hardly new to the history of criticism, critics having on the whole agreed for several centuries that Shakespeare is the real author of Hamlet), it was rather “auteur policy,” and meant simply that it is worth distinguishing between different artists (for what more does the once notorious remark that Renoir’s worst film is more interesting than Delannoy’s best amount to?). It is also obvious that its usefulness and interest exist within clearly defined limits, namely, the studio-dominated “commercial” cinema where the director is an employee. The proposition that (granted the social and historical determinants operative on any work of art) Bergman and Fellini are the real authors of most of their films is uninteresting because self-evident. The “auteur theory” is of value only where its validity is highly arguable.

Its value may, I think, prove to have been largely historical: what is valid in it is also obvious, and simply needed to be pointed out. Even Truffaut’s original principle is scarcely beyond question: yes, I think Tourneur is a more distinguished artist than Mark Robson, but there are a number of Tourneur assignments that I would hesitate to prefer to the least unappealing of Robson’s: the most one could say is that Tourneur’s camera-style shows taste and reticence, qualities that become pallid and tenuous indeed in Days of Glory, and vanish altogether in his Easy Living. A great artist’s failures are often interesting, certainly, but the interest lies in the light they throw on and the context they provide for the successes: that is to say, it is a passing interest. My interest in Sergeant York, for example, ceased when I felt I had understood its relation to Hawks’s successful works—which is another way of saying, when I had accounted for its failure. I have seen Rio Bravo something like twenty times, and would see it again tomorrow; I have seen Sergeant York thrice, and have no particular desire to repeat the experience. One can blame Hawks or not for the failure of Sergeant York: either, “the material was uncongenial, Hawks was ill-at-ease,” or “the failure of the film indicates clearly Hawks’s limitations.” Both seem to me true; it is the latter that gives the film its passing interest.

It still seems to me true that the director is the decisive determinant of the quality of the vast majority of films; but the statement must be qualified by important corollaries, which may at first appear contradictions. The first of these is that, the Hollywood cinema being in question, the presence of a given “auteur” is no guarantee of quality. It is not, of

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