![]() If you watch the RKO horror films produced by Val Lewton’s “snake pit” in the 1940s, you will find a consistency of theme and technique whether Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, or Mark Robson served as director. This is as true for Ferdinand Zecca at Pathe Freres in the earliest days of French cinema as it is for David Selznick during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Prior to the independent film movement of the 1950s, the producer often was dominant. Those who argue in support of the director’s eminence usually point out that since the director can have the final say over all aspects of a film production, he is ultimately responsible for those component parts.īut for a significant portion of film history, almost no director did have that level of control. Surely in a collaborative medium like cinema, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, choreographers, composers, editors, designers, etc… occasionally have a great deal to do with the quality of the final product. We are fighting the notion that has evolved over the past fifty years which suggests that the film director is exclusively responsible for the quality of a movie. Those of us who argue against the Auteur Theory today are not rehashing the Sarris-Kael imbroglio. And Sarris, as noted above, began backtracking and tinkering with his original conception almost from the beginning. But Pauline Kael (Sarris’ outraged lady) never denied that in many cases directors provide the dominant vision in a film. And, bolstered by the counter-arguments from, in Sarris’ words, “a lady critic with a lively sense of outrage,” the whole debate did in fact get critics to look at movies and directors in a new way. As Sarris initially proposed it, the theory provided a new method for analysing the careers of directors. ![]() ![]() ![]() There is much more of Paddy Chayefsky than of Arthur Hiller in The Americanization of Emily.” The Auteur Theory, germinated by the young critics of Cahiers du Cinema and then given a formal exposition by Sarris, was conceived of in a time of great artistic, commercial and political upheaval. Andrew Sarris, writing in the Introduction to his seminal book The American Cinema: “Not all directors are auteurs. The second of a two-part debate between CURNBLOG’s Simon Butler and Jonathan Eig on the legitimacy of the Auteur Theory. ![]()
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