film essay questions

40 Andrew Sarris

have been any more inspired than Voltaire's. Presum­

ably, the Age of Reason would have stifled Racine's

neoclassical impulses. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Bazin's

hypothesis can hardly be argued to a verifiable conclu­

sion, but I suspect somewhat greater reciprocity

between an artist and his zeitgeist than Bazin would

allow. He mentions, more than once and in other

contexts, capitalisn1's influence on the cinema. Without

denying this influence, I still find it impossible to

attribute X directors and Y films to any particular

system or culture. Why should the Italian cinema be

superior to the German cinema after one war, when

the reverse was true after the previous one? As for

artists conforn1ing to the spirit of their age, that spirit

is often expressed in contradictions, whether between

Stravinsky and Sibelius, Fielding and Richardson,

Picasso and Matisse, Chateaubriand and Stendhal.

Even if the artist does not spring from the idealized

head of Zeus, free of the embryonic stains of history,

history itself is profoundly affected by his arrival. If

we cannot imagine Griffith's October or Eisenstein's

Birth of a Nation because we find it difficult to trans­

pose one artist's unifying conceptions of Lee and

Lincoln to the other's dialectical conceptions of Lenin

and Kerensky, we are, nevertheless, compelled to rec­

ognize other differences in the perso11alities of these

two pioneers beyond their respective cultural com­

plexes. It is with these latter differences tF1at the auteur

theory is most deeply concerned. If directors and

other artists cannot be wrenched from their historical

environments, aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate

branch of ethnography.

I have not done full justice to the subtlety of

Bazin's reasoning and to the civilized skepticisn1 with

which he propounds his own argun1ents as slight

probabilities rather than absolute certainties. Conten1-

porary opponents of the auteur theory n1.ay feel that

Bazin himself is suspect as a member of the Cahiers

family. After all, Bazin does express qualified approval

of the auteur theory as a relatively objective method

of evaluating films apart from the subjective perils of

impressionistic and ideological criticism. Better to

analyze the director's personality than the critic's nerve

centers or politics. Nevertheless, Bazin makes his stand

clear by concluding: "This is not to deny the role of

the author, but to restore to him the preposition

without which the noun is only a limp concept.

'Author,' undoubtedly, but of what?"

Bazin's syntactical flourish raises an interesting

problem in English usage. The French preposition "de"

serves many functions, but among others, those of

possession and authorship. In English, the preposition

"by" once created a scandal in the American film

industry when Otto Preminger had the temerity to

advertise The Man With the Golden Arm as a film "by

Otto Preminger." Novelist Nelson Algren and The

Screenwriters' Guild raised such an outcry that

the offending preposition was deleted. Even the noun

"author" (which I cunningly mask as "auteur") has a

literary connotation in English. In general conversa­

tion, an "author" is invariably taken to be a writer.

Since "by" is a preposition of authorship and not of

ownership like the ambiguous "de," the fact that

Preminger both produced and directed The Man with

the Golden Arm did not entitle him in America to

the preposition "by." No one would have objected

to the possessive form: "Otto Preminger's The Man

with the Golden Arm." But, even in this case, a novelist

of sufficient reputation is usually honored with the

possessive designation. Now, this is hardly the case in

France, where The Red and the Black is advertised as

"un film de Claude Au tant-Lara." In America, "directed

by" is all the director can claim, when he is not also

a well-known producer like Alfred Hitchcock or Cecil

B. de Mille.

Since most American film critics are oriented

toward literature or journalism, rather than toward

future film-making, most American film criticism is

directed toward the script instead of toward the screen.

The writer-hero in Sunset Boulevard complains that

people don't realize that someone "writes a picture;

they think the actors make it up as they go along." It

would never occur to this writer or most of his col­

leagues that people are even less aware of the director's

function.

Of course, the much-abused man in the street has

a good excuse not to be aware of the auteur theory even as a figure of speech. Even on the so-called

classic level, he is not encouraged to ask "Aimez-vous

Griffith?" or "Aimez-vous Eisenstein?" Instead, it is

which Griffith or which Eisenstein? As for less

acclaimed directors, he is lucky to find their names in

the fourth paragraph of the typical review. I doubt

that most American film critics really believe that an

indifferently directed film is comparable to an indif­

ferently written book. However, there is little point in