Came across this from my studies at RMIT the other day. An interesting little read on the subject of establishing a director's auteur status and what qualifies the term.
Auteurship and
Narrative – Week 7 Reading - 8 September 2009
Maya Kavanagh
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Since the beginning of this course, we have been encouraged
to accept the viewpoints of various auteur critics such as Bazin and Sarris as
the gospel truth with rarely an alternative provided. That is until this week
when we were introduced to Pauline Kael.
Not only were Kael’s critical observations of the cinema considered "witty,
biting, highly opinionated, and sharply focused", they were also written
by a woman, a fact I was most pleased with. For too long I have felt that the
cinematic world has been overshadowed by the dominating presence of the
masculine empire and here finally, we have been introduced to a woman who is
equally ferocious about her opinions about film as her male counterparts. In
this weeks reading, Kael criticizes Sarris’ previous observations about what
makes a director an auteur, referring specifically to what Sarris calls “the
three premises of the film theory”. In the first section of her essay Circles and Squares, Joys and Sarris in
her highly acclaimed book I lost it at
the movies, Kael explicitly criticizes Sarris’ belief that “a great
director has to be at least a good director”. Kael explains that this statement
is a rule that cannot be applied to the declaration of a director’s auteur
status claiming, “the director MUST be judged on the basis of what HE
produces”. This means that in relation to other directors, a director cannot be
considered an auteur but, when his works are compared to each other, then and
only then can one distinguish whether or not he is “a great director”. This
ties in with the idea of the second and third premise which is for a director
to further be considered an auteur, his work must reflect a personal style, and
that the director’s personality itself is embodied within the film. When
comparing say Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, for example, to
say Michael Scorsese’s Goodfellas,
one can not concretely ascertain that Demy is a better director than Scorsese
as both directors choose to work within different genres and approach different
topics. However, when we compare Demy’s Parapluies
to his other film Lola, we can see
the similarities in style and expression which Sarris states are necessary for
a director to be deemed an auteur. Therefore, Kael’s observation that an
auteur’s status cannot merely be ascertained based on this principle alone is
correct. Demy’s status as an auteur can only be proved when we compare his
previous films to one another to determine whether or not he has imbedded a
particular style and attitude into his work.
