The auteur theory has many faces. I remember overhearing a recent conversation at Film Forum, that old lion of high film culture, between two gentlemen. One of them stated that it was Spielberg and Hitchcock (in that order) who popularized the notion of the director as author. The coinage of the phrase comes from Andrew Sarris in “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” This essay is the common starting point for those who look to the origins of American discourse on the subject. Even this assertion is suspect, since Sarris cites pieces written by Richard Roud and Ian Cameron as examples of auteurist positions predating his own.
The “birth” of auteurism is said to be François Truffaut’s 1954 polemic, “A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema.” Auteurism (if I may propose a working definition) is the practice of placing creative responsibility in the hands of directors over screenwriters, producers, actors, cinematographers, editors, set designers, and production studios. Directors, however, have always been held in high creative esteem. André Bazin himself does much of the work to prove this, writing—in the 1940s and 50s—of the greatness of Rossellini, Stroheim, and Welles, to name a few. Welles, Capra, and other famous directors were marketed as artists by Hollywood throughout the studio era. Theorist Rudolf Arnheim, writing in 1933, uses names like Dreyer and Von Sternberg to identify the individuals behind the stylistic devices that make the cinema an art form.
If we really want to locate the “birth” of auteurism, however, it must be the ad taken out by D.W. Griffith in the December 3rd, 1913 issue of the New York Dramatic Mirror. The ad declared him the sole author of his short films at the Biograph Company, a declaration necessitated by the fact that film companies credited themselves as the authors of their films in those days. Griffith forced Biograph and the public at large to recognize the director as the one who “made” the movies.
But of course, the codifying and systematizing of auteurism didn’t come along until much later. It was one thing for men like Griffith and Arnheim to take for granted the director as author; it was quite another for the Cahiers crowd and Sarris to shape polemics around the idea. Polemics like this brought scrutiny from many serious critics, from the openly hostile (Pauline Kael) to the cautiously skeptical (Bazin). If the essence of the theory can be traced back to 1913, however, the discourse of the theory may also have a deeper past than Truffaut. Manny Farber published many appreciations of filmmakers from the beginning of his career, decades before other American critics wished to exalt their own cinema. But it is one specific piece that may have acted as a polemical discourse for auteurism, long before the word was kicking around in Truffaut, Rivette, Roud or Sarris’s heads.
Seven months into his tenure as critic for The New Republic—almost 12 years before Truffaut’s shot across the bow—Farber published a piece entitled, “Movie Art” (26 Oct 1942). In it, Farber advocates for the art of cinema, specifically with how its works do in fact reflect the “signatures” of its authors. Sound familiar?
“Behind every shot in an Eisenstein movie is the cold, exacting sensibility of that artist with a compulsiveness like Cezanne’s that will plan every last piece of metal in a bit-player’s costume so that it will be within the expression of Eisenstein’s idea . . . Even when Chaplin is not on the screen in his movies, his thumbprint is (emphasis added) . . . Directors like Griffith, Chaplin, Welles, Sturges impose themselves everywhere.” With some minor adjustments, these sentiments would be made by Farber’s successors in subsequent decades.
But, in true Farber fashion, he anticipates the criticisms of orthodox auteurism, most eloquently voiced by Bazin in his April 1957 Cahiers piece, “On the politique des auteurs.” In Farber’s hands, though, those criticisms are used as refutations of the “cinema as non-art” claims that so many critics at the time were prone to make. Even though Farber and Bazin have different ends, their means are quite similar. “In ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ there is an equal grasp of the idea in the direction of John Ford and the acting of Henry Fonda . . . Nor can one discern who is more responsible for ‘The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc,’ cameraman Rudolph Maté or director Carl Dreyer . . . players like Cagney and W.C. Fields overcome any director.” Indeed, Farber sees authorship taking a multiplicity of forms, be it the director, actors, or even cinematographers. It’s not quite “the genius of the system,” but instead the voices of individuals leaving their traces on the work itself—rather than the blind corporate eyes of Warner Brothers or Paramount.
Farber opens up yet a third strain of auteurist discourse that would develop in the coming years. In this, he preempts anti-auteurists’ greatest complaint: the hierarchy of filmmakers being passed on to the films themselves. “I have listened to esthetes roar with laughter at a Chaplin movie, and come out criticizing it for its lack of movement or its sentimentality forgetting that they have seen Chaplin, not Eisenstein.” Bazin would indeed echo this idea when lamenting Cahiers’ rejection of Huston over Minnelli, despite both making mediocre films.
Furthermore, Farber also seems to negate Sarris’s claim that all of the proto-auteurist critics—Ferguson and James Agee among them—only paid attention to directors’ expression of social circumstances. They emphasized content over form. Fewer critics were more originally formalist than Farber, and even in this early period, when he would give column inches to story and social resonance, he was still primarily concerned with the material components of the medium. “The very boundaries of an art produce its most basic advantages. In the movies [this] is the movement of visual images . . .” Farber always considered the movement of images to be the essence of cinema, long before formalism would be a widely accepted practice by critics in both America and in Europe.
Farber was working under very different contextual circumstances in late 1942, and had other, perhaps more vital questions to answer than those with which Truffaut and his successors were faced. But to find the primary strains of auteurist discourse in this short polemic more than a decade before it would be given a name is nonetheless fascinating. Farber was usually one step ahead of everyone else; this article only serves to prove that fact even more deeply and significantly.
Evan Davis is currently a graduate student in film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His writing has appeared in Film Comment and The Auteurs Notebook.
Quite right, David. Farber was addressing different questions than the Cahiers boys. But I find it fascinating that so much of the discursive elements of the auteurist debate can be found in that earlier piece—even if Farber was using those means to quite different ends.
Did Manny Farber Invent Auteurism? A Closer Look over 2 years ago
The auteur theory has many faces. I remember overhearing a recent conversation at Film Forum, that old lion of high film culture, between two gentlemen. One of them stated that it was Spielberg and Hitchcock (in that order) who popularized the notion of the director as author. The coinage of the phrase comes from Andrew Sarris in “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” This essay is the common starting point for those who look to the origins of American discourse on the subject. Even this assertion is suspect, since Sarris cites pieces written by Richard Roud and Ian Cameron as examples of auteurist positions predating his own.
The “birth” of auteurism is said to be François Truffaut’s 1954 polemic, “A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema.” Auteurism (if I may propose a working definition) is the practice of placing creative responsibility in the hands of directors over screenwriters, producers, actors, cinematographers, editors, set designers, and production studios. Directors, however, have always been held in high creative esteem. André Bazin himself does much of the work to prove this, writing—in the 1940s and 50s—of the greatness of Rossellini, Stroheim, and Welles, to name a few. Welles, Capra, and other famous directors were marketed as artists by Hollywood throughout the studio era. Theorist Rudolf Arnheim, writing in 1933, uses names like Dreyer and Von Sternberg to identify the individuals behind the stylistic devices that make the cinema an art form.
If we really want to locate the “birth” of auteurism, however, it must be the ad taken out by D.W. Griffith in the December 3rd, 1913 issue of the New York Dramatic Mirror. The ad declared him the sole author of his short films at the Biograph Company, a declaration necessitated by the fact that film companies credited themselves as the authors of their films in those days. Griffith forced Biograph and the public at large to recognize the director as the one who “made” the movies.
But of course, the codifying and systematizing of auteurism didn’t come along until much later. It was one thing for men like Griffith and Arnheim to take for granted the director as author; it was quite another for the Cahiers crowd and Sarris to shape polemics around the idea. Polemics like this brought scrutiny from many serious critics, from the openly hostile (Pauline Kael) to the cautiously skeptical (Bazin). If the essence of the theory can be traced back to 1913, however, the discourse of the theory may also have a deeper past than Truffaut. Manny Farber published many appreciations of filmmakers from the beginning of his career, decades before other American critics wished to exalt their own cinema. But it is one specific piece that may have acted as a polemical discourse for auteurism, long before the word was kicking around in Truffaut, Rivette, Roud or Sarris’s heads.
Seven months into his tenure as critic for The New Republic—almost 12 years before Truffaut’s shot across the bow—Farber published a piece entitled, “Movie Art” (26 Oct 1942). In it, Farber advocates for the art of cinema, specifically with how its works do in fact reflect the “signatures” of its authors. Sound familiar?
“Behind every shot in an Eisenstein movie is the cold, exacting sensibility of that artist with a compulsiveness like Cezanne’s that will plan every last piece of metal in a bit-player’s costume so that it will be within the expression of Eisenstein’s idea . . . Even when Chaplin is not on the screen in his movies, his thumbprint is (emphasis added) . . . Directors like Griffith, Chaplin, Welles, Sturges impose themselves everywhere.” With some minor adjustments, these sentiments would be made by Farber’s successors in subsequent decades.
But, in true Farber fashion, he anticipates the criticisms of orthodox auteurism, most eloquently voiced by Bazin in his April 1957 Cahiers piece, “On the politique des auteurs.” In Farber’s hands, though, those criticisms are used as refutations of the “cinema as non-art” claims that so many critics at the time were prone to make. Even though Farber and Bazin have different ends, their means are quite similar. “In ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ there is an equal grasp of the idea in the direction of John Ford and the acting of Henry Fonda . . . Nor can one discern who is more responsible for ‘The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc,’ cameraman Rudolph Maté or director Carl Dreyer . . . players like Cagney and W.C. Fields overcome any director.” Indeed, Farber sees authorship taking a multiplicity of forms, be it the director, actors, or even cinematographers. It’s not quite “the genius of the system,” but instead the voices of individuals leaving their traces on the work itself—rather than the blind corporate eyes of Warner Brothers or Paramount.
Farber opens up yet a third strain of auteurist discourse that would develop in the coming years. In this, he preempts anti-auteurists’ greatest complaint: the hierarchy of filmmakers being passed on to the films themselves. “I have listened to esthetes roar with laughter at a Chaplin movie, and come out criticizing it for its lack of movement or its sentimentality forgetting that they have seen Chaplin, not Eisenstein.” Bazin would indeed echo this idea when lamenting Cahiers’ rejection of Huston over Minnelli, despite both making mediocre films.
Furthermore, Farber also seems to negate Sarris’s claim that all of the proto-auteurist critics—Ferguson and James Agee among them—only paid attention to directors’ expression of social circumstances. They emphasized content over form. Fewer critics were more originally formalist than Farber, and even in this early period, when he would give column inches to story and social resonance, he was still primarily concerned with the material components of the medium. “The very boundaries of an art produce its most basic advantages. In the movies [this] is the movement of visual images . . .” Farber always considered the movement of images to be the essence of cinema, long before formalism would be a widely accepted practice by critics in both America and in Europe.
Farber was working under very different contextual circumstances in late 1942, and had other, perhaps more vital questions to answer than those with which Truffaut and his successors were faced. But to find the primary strains of auteurist discourse in this short polemic more than a decade before it would be given a name is nonetheless fascinating. Farber was usually one step ahead of everyone else; this article only serves to prove that fact even more deeply and significantly.
Evan Davis is currently a graduate student in film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His writing has appeared in Film Comment and The Auteurs Notebook.
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Did Manny Farber Invent Auteurism? A Closer Look over 2 years ago
Quite right, David. Farber was addressing different questions than the Cahiers boys. But I find it fascinating that so much of the discursive elements of the auteurist debate can be found in that earlier piece—even if Farber was using those means to quite different ends.
Go to Comment