Victoria Rust
Seminar on Cultural Theory: M
November 3, 2004
Position Paper on The Auteur Theory by Peter Wollen

The auteur theory sprang from the interest that French critics in the fifties had in forgotten or underrated Hollywood films. Their starting assumption was that masterpieces could  “happen” to less known and therefore underestimated film directors. The auteur was perceived as an individual who clearly left the mark of his personality upon the film process. Traditionally, the model of an author in the cinema was that of the European director with an open artistic aspiration and full control over film. However, as Peter Wollen points out, the careers of these acclaimed European directors could often stagnate or even be reduced to total anonymity as they crossed the Atlantic to continue making films in Hollywood. For example, the works of English and American Hitchcock, German and American Lang, or French and American Renoir were often contrasted unfavorably.

Discussed first among a group of critics who wrote for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, the auteur theory received a boost from a thriving French cine-club movement. The focus of auteur theorists was not so much the historical context of the film, but its context within the total body of the director's work. Thus, it was the structure of the films made by the same director that was analyzed. The director was considered an auteur if his work was unified and added up to a coherent body of signifiers, which included recurring themes and motifs. In theory at least, the director could be a terrible artist and still an auteur.

The auteur theory implies an operation of decipherment. Its goal is to “uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and treatment a hard core of basic and often recondite motifs.” As Wollen points out, it is the pattern formed by these motifs that gives an author’s work a particular structure. Although there has been a controversy whether directors should be seen as auteurs or metteurs en scène, Wollen suggests that the main difference between the two definitions lies in the meaning of the film: for the auteur films, it is constructed a posteriori, whereas for the metteur films the meaning -- defined as semantic rather than stylistic or expressive -- exists a priori. Lesser auteurs are defined by a core of basic motifs, which remain constant, whereas the great directors must be defined in terms of shifting relations, in their singularity as well as their uniformity.

The work of the director Howard Hawks, according to Wollen, serves as the “test case” for the auteur theory. Almost all of the Hawks’ films, as Wollen notes, exhibit the same visual style and tempo. The director achieved such comparable unity by reducing film genres in his work to two: crazy comedy and adventure drama. One observes certain commonalities in Hawks’ dramas: his protagonists are always professionals who pride on their abilities. Hawks’ heroes are cattlemen, marlin-fishermen, racing drivers, pilots, and big-game hunters, used to danger and being outcasts. In many of his adventure dramas, Hawks explored the phenomenon of heroism. According to Wollen, Hawks saw the “transcendent” value of heroism “beyond the individual, in solidarity with others and without any historical dimension, ” whereas such directors as Ford and Boettlicher, approached heroism within society and its history (Ford) or preferred heroic protagonists act by dissolving groups of any kind into their constituent individuality (Boettlicher). Another striking characteristic of Hawks’ adventure dramas is the absence of married life. Although woman is not seen as threat, men are her “prey”. Such peculiarity of Hawks’s vision, Wollen explains, is caused by the director’s conviction that all-male community is an “ultimate” society.

In his crazy comedies, Hawks depicts two primary themes: first, regression to childhood, infantilism as in Monkey Business or savagery as in The Ransom of the Red Chief; second, the theme of sex-reversal and role-reversal as in Bringing up Baby and I Was a Male War Bride. Many of his comedies, such as Bringing up Baby and Man’s Favorite Sport center round dominating women and timid men.  

Wollen uses a structural approach to define the core of the repeated motifs in Hawks’ work. However, such structuralist criticism, he suggests, cannot rest at the perception of resemblances or repetitions but must also comprehend a system of differences and oppositions. Using the words of Levi-Strauss, there must be a “moment of synthesis” as well as the moment of analysis; otherwise the method is formalist, not structuralist. Wollen sees film as a “network of different statements, crossing and contradicting each other”; these statements form within a film a coherent individual vision. When comparing several films of the same director, it is possible to decipher a certain structure, which underlines and shapes the film. This structure is associated with a single director not because he has expressed his own artistic vision of the film, but because it is possible for a careful viewer to decode the “unconscious, unintended” meaning of the director within his films. Auteur analysis consists of tracing the structure and not the message within the work; the auteur film is an “explanatory device,” which specifies how the individual film work.

Finally, the auteur theory redefines film evaluation. Instead of binding the evaluation process of films to certain “timeless criteria”, such as rich content and complex form that are either united or “isomorphic” with each other, Wollen suggests divorcing ourselves from the utopian concept of unity and “integral content” within works of art. Focus in the process of evaluation should lie not in the exhaustive interpretation, but in the productivity of the work.

Questions to Ponder

1. In his essay, Wollen presents us with examples of a “lesser” (Hawks) and “greater”(Ford) auteur. According to Wollen, it is the “richness of the shifting relations between the antinomies” in Ford’s work that makes him a greater artist and auteur. Based on the films of Lang (M, Metropolis, Fury, etc) and Hitchhock (Rear Window, Notorious, etc), elaborate on your choice of a greater/lesser auteur.

2.Wollen insists that structure of the film is undoubtedly the main characteristic to observe in auteur films. Taking LangÂ’s films as an example, what other features can one single out?