Beyond the Author

by Alberto Boschi and Giacomo Manzoli

"La dixième symphonie is by Abel Gance," Delluc wrote in 1918 with an affirmativeness which anticipated the style of the early Cahiers by almost four decades. And then: "Here is a movie no one else could make, because its author reveals himself in every part of it." (1) These words must be understood, in the first place, as a claim of the director's full responsibility in an age when his authorial status was all but granted. Furthermore, they also emphasise an aspect of the author notion use which seems to be more specifically related to cinema than to any other expressive field. Delluc's statement, in fact, implicitly postulates that that movie might be not by Abel Gance and stresses that the author ideology, so as it has been expressed by film critics since Delluc's days up to now, implies that some movies do have an author and others don't. If it totally lacks individual or original elements, surely we can state that a given literary or pictorial work shall be considered more as the expression of the collective style or fashion of an age or genre, rather than of an author's "idiolect;" but we would never question that the author is the one who materially does the work (unless we consider it as some fake or some apocrypha, the work of a ghost writer or a "school" product).

As for film history, on the contrary, the hypothesis of an author-less movie has from the very beginning a concrete, literal meaning. This is due, in the first place, to the reproductive nature of the underlying device, which a priori excludes any direct intervention in the recording of image or sound, nominating as film co-authors the represented reality, on the one hand, and the device itself, on the other. Secondly, due to the variety of specific skills and contributions mostly participating in the movie making process (scriptwriter, director, producer, actors, musicians, sound engineer, editor, set-designer, director of photography, and so on, just to quote but few), cinematic work has a collective, or "choral," character - in De Santis' words here taken over by Pierre Sorlin.(2) The number of these figure has not always been equally high in film history - going from the scriptwriter-camera-man-performer-editor filmmaker of some avant-garde films to the endless list of co-operators sliding in nowadays high-budget productions' end titles. Furthermore, they have always been subject to hierarchizations highly contingent on time, country, and on the ideological, aesthetic or productive context.

Among these figures, some have always been more appreciated than others (the musician, for instance, among all other figures who co-operate in doing the soundtrack) on account both of the real importance of their contribution, and because of "outer" - so to say -, ideological and cultural factors: for example, the aesthetic value critics have always ascribed to the visual element rather than to the sound has led to emphasise the role of the director of photography more than what would have been due - favouring canonisations and narcissisms à la Storaro - and to totally ignore in certain cases the importance of the sound engineer; the "authorship license" our culture has acknowledged in the centuries to the music composer has surely co-operated, beyond the role's real credits, to grant him that privileged position he has in credit titles since the advent of sound films; or, again, the well-established professional status previously achieved in the theatre by the set-designer paradoxically led to give more importance to his name (though in the case of some Hollywood professionals such as Cedric Gibbons, who made all the MGM settings between 1924 and the late Fifties, this name is nothing more than a trade-mark) than to new film professions like the film editor. (Another, more ideological reason, perhaps, also justifies the singular repression of this important figure, and precisely the expressive and "linguistic" emphasis put by film aesthetics on the editing and the consequent refusal to recognize that in most cases this operation is not made by the director-author himself.)

In this changeable hierarchy of skills, however, only three figures could be proposed or could propose themselves in film history as responsible of the cinematic work as a whole: the scriptwriter, the actor and the director. If the writer (playwriter or scriptwriter), availing himself of his authorial descent, harshly contended with the parvenu film-maker for the fatherness of the cinematic work at the beginning of the century, having another go with the advent of sound film (see at this regard the debate between Clair and Pagnol on the "filmed theatre"(3)); and if the actor succeeded in promoting himself as the most important maker of the movie, particularly in the glory days of Hollywood star system, taking over the functions of producer, actor, scriptwriter and often director, (4) it was the director who at last came off better, and not unjustly.

In fact, this figure, though his intervention on the movie is less direct and assessable if compared to that of other professionals (such as the director of photography, the musician, the actors), and even if he just carries out an idea others have conceived (the producer, the scriptwriter, the author of the work filmed), in almost all aesthetic and productive contexts as well as in almost all ages of film history, he has remained the figure who guides and coordinates the various skills participating in the making of a movie. Similarly, the credit for the staging of a play is generally given to the theatre producer (whose most assured and precise function the film director has inherited: i.e., the direction of the actors (5)), as the interpretation of a symphony is usually supposed to be the conductor's credit, though that doesn't do the players justice (unlike Fellini, as it is well-known, Adorno thought that an orchestra can conduct itself without the help of any conductor (6)). But a substantial difference can be noted here: a movie, as the unique recording of a "technically" endlessly reproducible performance, fixed once and for all, is not, unlike the playing of a symphony or a theatrical staging, one of the theoretically numberless and every time different, possible actualisations of a musical score or of a literary text; it is the text itself. Thus, even when a movie is the filming of a literary or dramatic work, the director, as the - really or supposedly - main responsible of the "mise en film," becomes its author, to use Flaiano's phrase taken over by Michel Chion in this issue. (7)

A fourth figure, at least in certain production contexts (like Hollywood classical one) can contend with the director for its directive function, and precisely the producer. However, if in these situations the producer imposes himself as an even more directive "double," an even more general (but at the same time more indirect) supervisor of the director, putting the latter in the role of a mere partial executor, at the same time he isolates and defines in a clearer way the director's specific function, that of directing the actors and the artistic and technical staff, freeing him from the burdens he is often unable or unwilling to take over. (8)

(That's exactly the sense of the parable Minnelli told in The Bad and the Beautiful, where the despotic Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields, played by Kirk Douglas, seems to be the only true author of his movies, whereas the director is depicted as a grey official, a dark "crowd artist" kept constantly in the background. Towards the end of the story, the director rebels against the producer's insolence and leaves the filming; Shields decides then to personally run his new production incurring an unavoidable fiasco, which didactically proves the importance of the director's mediation).

In spite of all necessary allowances, shall we acknowledge the director's "authorship"? Yes, if we intend it as a weak authorship, a "limited liability" authorship (contingent on contexts and ages), as an unsteady authorship constantly questioned and menaced; above all, if we don't let the author notion become the key of the film exegesis. The most manifest symptoms of its problematic nature are the difficulty and ambiguousness arising each time who writes about cinema (even the people involved in it) has to delimitate and define the director's responsibilities, and the extremely changeable, uncertain character of such definitions as well as the fact that almost all the "author theories" preferred to emphasise the creativity of the staging work rather than to assign, even only ideal-typically, the auteur de film a full responsibility on the work (which would also include the conception and the development of the treatment). In 1927 Rene Clair wrote: "That must be clear: being the author of a movie doesn't necessarily mean having conceived its theme, what the audience calls the 'story'. That would mean that it was not Racine the author of his tragedies, but Tacitus, Euripides, Segrais or even Henrietta of England ... The 'story' is not fundamental. [ ... ] The author of a movie is the one who does the 'decoupage' of the script, who guides the material 'making' and 'edits' the shot scenes." (9) This is by no means a radical position if compared to an age where, in narrative and dramatic arts, adaptation and remake are almost totally fallen into disuse and an author, in the true sense of the word, is normally supposed to conceive an original "theme."

Turning back to the beginning of our exposition, in all discourses on cinema, the author notion has always been nourished by the possibility (and actual existence) of a movie with many authors, i.e. without one author. Thus, if in 1918 Delluc, by stating that La dixième symphonic is by Abel Gance, evoked the disquieting ghost of a completely "impersonal" work, in 1929 Jean Epstein complained of the lack of a directive figure in the early sound film, who would take over all the phases of the film making ("Up till now - he wrote - no spoken or sound movie has had an author, has been a work" (10)). Thus, if the antiquate opposition between European authors and Hollywood practicers is still the critics' deepest rooted prejudice, the game played in the Fifties by the Cahiers' "jeune turcs," who more than anyone have helped to undermine such a dichotomy by "scandalously" widening the range of the author notion, ultimately consisted in giving or denying this or that cineaste an authorship license according to evaluations that - as Antonio Costa here remembers (11) - were the result of totally arbitrary and subjective choices. That gave the aesthetic debate upon the author notion in film that strongly ideological, programmatic, arbitrary character, imposed in a somehow forced (though not totally discretionary) way. This notion, as already said, can and shall be preserved, but only provided that it is constantly "relativised," demystified, verified through the historical analysis in its application field and actual operativeness, and above all compared and brought to interact with other notions, as for instance that of genre, production system or work (as Chion proposes).

Therefore, the term "touch" appears much more suitable than "style," in spite of its inexactness (or perhaps exactly for its vagueness) to define the director/author's specific contribution. Widely used in music to describe the way a player plays his instrument, or in painting and literature to indicate - according to the dictionary item - "the characteristic hallmark of an author or an artist," the term has had a particular appeal among film critics, above all in its English version. Whereas, in fact, the term "style" evokes the idea of a "strong" author, totally responsible for his whole work, "touch" expresses far better the condition of a film director, which is never author in its full meaning.

The touch is the immediately recognisable hallmark through which the director/author inscribes his own individuality inside a work he has not directly produced, or - in Jost's words - which marks with its physical, unique and irreplaceable (autographic) identity the film script, as an endlessly repeatable (allographic) score.

Some doubts remain as for the identity of the "printer" (and, as it is known, any doubt is here in principle reasonable: what if Wells' sequence shot was on the contrary to be attributed to Gregg Tolland? What if Frank Capra's universe was actually Robert Riskin's? And if the charm of the latest Scorsese's films depended mostly on Thelma Schoonmaker's talent, his extraordinary editor?) And, above all: where is this mark, this touch contained? One would be tempted to answer, like Cahiers' critics: in the mise en scène, if only this notion itself was not at the same time too vague and reductive: too vague because it covers heterogeneous operations - the direction of actors, the "cadrage", the editing, etc. - which are not always under the full control of the author, and too reductive because it excludes a priori what happens "before" the film making (the script writing, the dialogues) and in its current meaning, with the burden of its "iconocentric" prejudice inherited from the silent movies, it turns out to unavoidably be identified with the visual staging (hence, the silly idea that cineastes like Mankiewicz or Pagnol are not fully authors because they prefer the dialogues and have no specific figurative conception (12)). The most reasonable answer would therefore be: everywhere, in the style of the dialogue, in the camera position, in a certain kind of tracking shot, in some editing solutions, in the plot construction, in the configuration of space, in the acting style imposed to the actors, in the occurring of objects, characters, landscapes or situations, in the use of the score, and so on. Again, as the director of photography Raoul Coutard says in Godard's Passion, "cinema has no fixed rules. That's why people still go to the movies."

To introduce this issue which, starting with these assumptions, aims at analytically dealing with the notion of film author, knowing that it opens by publishing (although in the ideal form of a scenario) the most authorial of films is some kind of embarrassment. We would then incline to agree with James Naremore's statement according to which "auteurism is dead, but so are debates over the death of the author." (13) The point is not to deny or revolutionise a hundreds-year-old notion which has been pivotal for disciplines like aesthetics and cultural anthropology. On the contrary, our aim is to verify, by following the thread of this notion's development in film, whether it is possible to imagine a kind of hermeneutics, or historiography or even a simple fruition model able to completely prescind from the Oedipus' problem or at least to put it aside on a secondary level. It is hardly necessary to say that what supports such an incautious query as ours is the sound belief that even if at the end the answer will be negative, it would be nonetheless worthwhile. First of all, we must understand what do we talk about when we talk about author; we must see the global system, and the way this ambiguous chase of author, work and user (the good, the ugly and the bad: where the good is always the work and the other two tend to alternate) originates and develops according to coordinates where cinema finds it very hard to get its bearings (no wonder if one of the reasons why it is so hard to consider the film as a work of art is the difficulty to connect a strong artist figure to it).

By reversing the terms, we would like to start from Mukarovsky's question: "Why does the artist create a work of art?" After talking about "weariness" for a now "hypertrophic" artistic personality, about symptoms like "the preference for an anonymous, semi-popular, more simple art," or about the artist's effort for "being considered as an artisan or a worker" (attitudes which are well known to anyone who is familiar with cinema and what is generally said about it), Mukarovsky simply states "that the relationship between the artist's personality and his work is neither direct or immediate, and in particular it is not spontaneous, and not that the artist's personality doesn't exist." (14) Now, we like such a thought because it implies a margin, a split between the author and his work: the measurement of this space in the cinema is the ambition of our issue.

To compare a modern concept originated in old artistic disciplines to a modern art which, however, shares many aspects of the old way of making art is a relevant problem. According to Barthes "the author is a modern character produced by our society when it discovered the prestige of the individual and the human person." (15) Foucault adds that "les discours ont commencé à avoir réellement des auteurs [...] dans la mesure où 1'auteur pouvait être puni, c'est-à-dir dans la mesure où les discours pouvaient être transgressifs." (16) The Foucault's text from which this quotation is taken is the one most frequently mentioned in the following papers.

This is no accident, because Foucault is the one who enlarged the research field by detecting the existence of an "author-function," defined as "grouping principle of the discourses, as unity and origin of their meanings, and the heart of their coherence." (17) This definition looks so wide, so elastic, that a way out of it seems hardly possible to find. Foucault, after all, spoke of a text author. That is very different from a work author, if it is true that (so Barthes) the text is a grid which can resist, unlike the work, even without a father or his warranty. To focus on the text, however, on the idea of intertextuality, on a model author as an "implicit textual strategy" (with all the very interesting, empirical and even marginal authors) (18) can mean to deviate from the initial intention which did not concern the author but his possible absence. What happens to a movie (may it be seen as a text or a work) at the moment you try to do without the person who, according to the etymology, let it grow (augère)? Does the growth stop? Does it grow in a confused, uncontrolled, monstrous way? Does everything remain inert? Risks and difficulties are many: "Comme institution, I'auteur est mort: sa personne civile, passionnelle, biographique, a disparu; dépossédée, elle n'exerce plus sur son oeuvre la formidable paternité dont 1'histoire litteraire, I'enseignement, 1'opinion avaient à charge d'établir et de renouveler le récit: mais dans le texte, d'une certaine façon, je désire 1'auteur: j'ai besoin de sa figure (qui n'est ni sa représentation, ni sa projection), comme il a besoin de la mienne (sauf à 'babiller')." (19)

Once the author is dead no one else will succeed him, but surely something will be found which wants to take over his function. But what? We do not hope to answer such a question in these pages, not even in such a big journal as this. We are nonetheless sure that the following papers, though heterogeneous, can provide a significant incentive to reconsider a matter which is not at all settled by the author's death, and to come back to an issue which strongly influences both critics and film theory and history. That is a problem we must face or we accept to take the risk of becoming our words' tools, instead of their authors. There are other questions inextricably connected to the notion of author, and the here proposed discussion can perhaps help to outline them in a more useful, if not a clearer way. The enigma of style, for instance, is fundamental; it is a sort of objective correlative of the author inside the work. It is what characterises every "not accidental expression." (20) The problem about cinema seems to be that of making acceptable as a not accidental expression an art where the device essentially has a decisive role and weight, and the latter is such that it makes you believe you can give up any other support. As for cinema, just like as for anything else, one should never forget that, as M. Schapiro points out, an artist is not present at the same degree in everything he does, even though some constant characteristics can be detected. (21)

But which ones?

Now a brief description of the contents of Fotogenia 2 and 3, well aware, as we have already said, of the general limits and risks of our proposal, but also of the value of the single contributions and the potential that a discussion of this kind may have if it finds interlocutors capable to give new input to it. A first group of papers - partly made up of lectures given during the congress Prima dell'autore (Udine, March 1996) - focuses on the silent film age. Through a constant comparison to the history of painting and older visual arts, François Jost investigates the birth and the development of the author notion in the film, and finally arrives at a theoretical definition of cinematic authorship by using Goodman's opposition between autography and allography, as it has been reviewed by Gerard Genette. Gian Piero Brunetta provides documents to the formation of the film author concept in Italy during the '10s, Marco Bertozzi aims at filling the gap between authorial canonisation of the Lumière Brothers and the impersonality of their views casting a glance upon the film age before the author notion. Guglielmo Pescatore focuses upon France in the Twenties, and in particular upon the praxis and the debate about the concept of photogénie. François de la Bretèque discusses the suitability of the term "author" applied to a cineaste like Louis Feuillade. A second group of contributions considers, then, the development of this notion from the period after the second World War up till today, i.e., in the time of its greatest flourishing. Pierre Sorlin puts the emphasis on the gap between Neorealist cineastes' idea of film making and the approach of Italian critics during the same period. Antonio Costa analyses the phases and contents of the politique des auteurs in the glorious days of the early Cahiers. Riccardo Ventrella describes its development in the writings of Serge Daney, analysing the intellectual biography of the late critic. Jeff Bell proposes an original re-interpretation of what the English-speaking critics defines as the author theory, adopting the theoretical and methodological tools of French post-structuralism. Other papers, which do not specifically belong to the one topic or the other, extend the range of research to still little-known territories. By taking over one of the Foucault's ideas in "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?," Gianni Rondolino, investigates the possibility of a film history without authors. Michel Chion, then, starts from the problem of film sound in order to develop a general comment on the author notion, to which he opposes the not indispensably complementary concept of work. Dario Tomasi, in the end, carefully analyses the construction by Western critics of an "other" authorial figure, the great Japanese director Mizoguchi Kenji, highlighting the limits of the models adopted.

Return to Fotogenia n. 2