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The Auteur Theory: Filmmakers Beware

There was an interesting piece at Slate in 2006 about the auteur theory in film criticism with regard as to whether film directors and screenwriters can both be given credit for being the central creators of an especially great movie. Read that piece here and be prepared for a cogent lesson in the history of movie reviewing. I think the theory is useful, but that it ought to be considered sparingly: it's useful as a particular aspect of film criticism and review, but it is a notion that we are better off retiring altogether. The problem with the idea is that a generation of film critics spent their time generating convolutions about directors and their reputations, using the auteur-ism as the main filter, rather than actually assessing the films that were being made. What we wound up with was little about individual films and much about puffed-up reputations. The theory, I suspect, has helped ruin a few film maker's products, as in the case of Martin Scorsese. 

Scorsese might as well be screaming through a bullhorn about his auteur status. On the other hand, Clint Eastwood has an easy claim on the term, although he wears his ascendancy to Great Directorhood like it were a loose suit. It shows in the movies he makes, I think. Fascinating as his films are, they are marred by an arty( as opposed to artful)virtuosity that steps out of the frame and instructs the viewer that genius and vision are unveiled in front of them. There is great talent here instead of self-declared genius, which is to say that Eastwood uses his filmmaker skills to serve a story, not pad his resume. I've thought for years that the auteur theory was useful mostly to fanboys who wanted a means to turn their film hero obsessions into matters of serious study, thereby providing them with a reason to discourse as a matter of professional dispatch about their teenage enthusiasm. The same has happened to rock criticism and continues as popular arts chatter mimics the tonier rhetoric of literary and theater criticism. Everyone, given a theory to match their preferred diversion, gets to be a know-it. 

It beats learning a trade, I suppose. A pesky item in the concept is the advance of reputation over the quality of specific work. Dozens of second, third, and fourth-rate directors whose films exhibit the tendencies a nominal auteur must have, such as a readily identifiable camera style that accents and enhances a director's personalized view of the world. Jack Webb, creator and star of Dragnet, wrote and directed films that transported the cue-card realism of the television show to the wider screen, "30", "The DA," "Pete Kelly's Blues" among them. The style is very distinct; the writing stands out from anything else in the field, the world view, basically post-Hemingway misery about loners abiding by a code without which the planet descends into slow chaos, bespeaks the traits the auteur critics consider as graces. Yet there's a reason Webb's films only see an infrequent screening on AMC or one of the Turner stations while Howard Hawks or John Ford are shown repeatedly; Webb's films are fascinating for their stiff professionalism but are in plain fact dull and dulling. Just imagine Dragnet's basic flat line style transposed to newspaper offices, a Marine base, or a jazz band, with the storyline stretched to feature film length, and you can imagine something so trudging and cement shod that you might mistake it for Brecht. Hawks and Ford, or others one can name, easily break out of the specialized auteur ghetto and aren't afraid to entertain the senses. Auteurism's particular limit is the failure of the proponents that not all filmmakers are worth the same amount of enthusiastic ink.

Soupy Sales, RIP

I can't actually say to what degree a television comedian like Soupy Sales had on me as I grew up, but it's enough to say that he was a large part of my viewing life while otherwise growing up in Detroit in the early sixties. His wackiness has remained a family reference point for years. When my father passed away in 1995, the five of us kids--Julia, Owen, Hollis, Reed and myself --went to the LaJolla Comedy a month later where Sales was scheduled to perform. Well, perform he did, delivering what seemed to be an endless stream of jokes, drink in hand, his face still rubbery and begging for a fabled pie in the face. The jokes were blue, the memories were grand, and it seemed an appropriate way to remember our lives with our father and our eventual destination, California. Some have mentioned his influence on Saturday Night Live and Pee Wee Herman. You can read some more on Sales here and here.

Horses as they are

Small poem, a slight quiet annoyance for some, perhaps, but simple enough for me, and not presenting it's point in terms of sighing regret or grating contemplation--Rachel Richardson's poem "The Horses" .A pleasant enough commemoration of the strange elegance of horses ; there is something in the regal, streamlined, artful symmetry of these creatures that compel us to stare at them and compose the reams of association placing them in grander contexts and greater purposes. Rachel Richardson goes through some paces edifying us with the grace and dignity horses have regardless of their situation and seems about to announce a greater revelation with equine metaphors, but she steps off the usual path. The horses, over conceptualized as creatures gifted with a naturally inextricable freedom, are seen here not as animals with a will to power, a creative striving, a need to express themselves in action. They are at the river under the low trees and in the flower bed at the edge of town for simply this:

Not because
they are parched or starving. They walk

because night stretches out, and there is a road,
and someone has opened the gate.

This is a neat collapsing of assumptions when you come on the last clarifying realization after wondering about the possible causes of something strange you've just witnessed. The more complex scenarios involving agency are moot points entirely, inapplicable, uttered for their own sake. Someone simply forgot to close the gate and horses wandered off because that's what they do when their is no obstruction. Not with purpose, necessarily, but just wander off until they tire. That's what we all do, after all.

"Freedom" is the slippery slope Richardson wisely skips.Being "free" is, to a degree, a matter of definition and how a culture collectively projects that onto the world it lives in; men are free (or not) , as far as the political and legal systems he finds himself under. Freedom is merely those things and activities that are not prohibited by the State. Horses, quite outside the concerns of human dignity, rights and wandering concepts like freedom, just are , as far we know, a species no less restricted than man is. Freedom , in any sense that's meaningful, requires a contrary concept and an attending philosophy--slavery, dictatorship, charismatic rule, indentured servitude, prison life. One chooses to live freely and one chooses, as well, an ethical system through which voluntary actions confirm the value of being relatively unhindered in one's pursuit of happiness. Man may well decide to wander to the river because he enjoys the water flowing by or because he prefers the taste of non-tapped water; these are aesthetic considerations, subjective, difficult to assess, perfect for a layering of justifying metaphor to explain the quaint preference.

Horses, however, go to the river and wind up in flowerbeds because that's what they do; there is an imperative I'd say that has more to do with genetically generated behavior than with any dreamy concept of unfettered existence. Horses are free? To do what, be a horse? Horses haven't the means to become anything else other than horses and, for all we know, lack the facility to imagine themselves as another species. They are stuck being horses, with no choice in the matter.

THE LANGUAGE OF JOY

Speaking of times in twangs and tongues
of alien regions which share memories
of months and distant smells of dust and oil
rising from the black asphalt hours before the rains came.

California an alloy where grandchildren
Meet each other in jobs that make no sense and
compare notes over hot, tasteless coffee about
what it was their grandparents were saying,
something in code that firmed up their backbone
and brought a mist to their eyes.

We are too close to the expiration dates of our lives
to think of parachutes when its Autumn by the Pacific Ocean
in a city whose best exports are sand and gunboats,

warm air and cool breezes turns us into
a generation of rasping sighs in lawn chairs nursing drinks
under tourist umbrellas in the neighborhoods we moved into
three decades ago in expectation of making a mark
on a locale that was as unknown
as anything we wanted to do with our lives.


Its about gloom and rain and love of defeated weather
that has me speaking for a generation that exists only
as that we that goes only by one name, mine, still typing,
hot as a riot when the music gets loud and someone else is being clever.
Its about being sorry for rich people for being so pathetically well-oil when integrity is the only thing Ive been eating

In coffee houses in motels
near the fair grounds dealing in degrees of English
and slants of the camera eye,
it's about the loneliness of standing
in the same place with the sinking feeling
that gunboats are riot enough
Wondering what in the universe makes sense
when youre bored for no good reason,
and philosophy has been retired until everyone gets back from the beach ,
from the water of laughter comes in many streams, the language of joy.

Hit them back

Fox News has its collective under garment creeping into the their puckered private area because the Obama White House, from the man himself and higher staff members, have opined that the Murdoch channel isn't a news organization, but rather a propaganda arm for the Republican National Committee. Three cheers for the good guys; it's about times Democrats, be they liberals, progressives, moderates or blue dogs, talk back to the noise machine.

The American Left certainly wasn't afraid of offending political sensibilities while there was a Viet Nam war through which the ultimately unprovability of historical determinism could be obscured by a conflict whose obscenity over rode local matters. But with the end of the war, the left here abouts receded to theory, unwilling, I think , to realize something fundamentally decent about Americans and their sense of fairness to the right cause, and it seemed to matter little to the intellectual elite to deal with practical matters of policy , county, state and federal.

The left became generalized in theory and law, and reduced everything to an eviscerated discourse of euphemistic speech that was not allowed to defile a sense of neutrality: things ceased to have names, only vague descriptions , and in this atmosphere any talk about identifying problems about what sickens the Nation became impossible . Rather than take action to change social relations, real practice, a fight for change was reduced to a ideologically perplexed course in etiquette, the practice of which made humans confront each other in ways that were nervous, nervous, ultimately insane. The progressives were more interested in shoring up their tenuous gains since the start of the Civil Rights Movement, which suited Republicans just fine.

"Guts" comes to mind, courage, old fashioned and romantic virtues , but still ways to talk about the world, the city where we might live, and within in, a way to imagine and realize the ways to make it maybe make it more workable than it was then when we entered into it, knowing only hunger and the feeling of cold earth. The courage we speak has been demonstrated with the winning of both houses of Congress and the White House; what remains to be done , in a fair fight, is to pursue the cause and smacking down the grimy dogs who would bring us down.

Art and history

One advances into a their art with no real concern about making history--their obvious concerns are about making their art, with some idea of what it is they're advancing toward, and what past forms are being modified and moved away from. But the judgement of history--as if History, capital H, were a bearded panel viewing a swimsuit compeition--will be delivered piecemeal, over the years, after most of us are dead, and our issues and concerns and agendas are fine dust somewhere. The artist, meantime, concentrates on the work, working as though outside history, creating through some compulsion and irrational belief that the deferred import of the work will be delivered to an audience someday, somehow. That is an act of faith, by definition. The artist, painter or otherwise, also casts their strokes, with brush or mallet, with the not-so-buried-dread of the possibility that that the work will remain unknown, shoved in the closet, lost in the attic, and they will be better known for their day job rather than their manipulation of forms through a rarified medium. History is not some intelligence that has any idea of what it's going prefer in the long run--the best I can offer is that history is news that stays news, to paraphrase a poet, which implies that the painter who survives the tides and eddies of tastes and fashion and fads will the one whose work has an internalized dynamic that is felt long after the brush is dropped and the breathing stopped.