In my capacity as previewer of TV movies for this newspaper, I occasionally receive letters from readers complaining of the absence of the director's name from the panel. More often than not, the name is included in my mini-review, but, the letter-writers argue, this is not adequate - the director should always be listed below the title. Their arguments rest on the fundamental assumption that the director is always the author of a film, and they see the omission of the name as an indication that cinema is not taken seriously as an art form. "In book reviews, the author's name is always given along with the title. A director, as the author of a film, is entitled to the same respect," is a typical comment.
It's an assumption shared by critics and reviewers as much as anyone else - we employ the name of a director as a convenient shorthand, where sometimes it is neither appropriate nor accurate.
But in many cases the idea of director as creator doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, as the public is well aware. Of the current crop of releases, does anyone think of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me as a Jay Roach film? Or of Notting Hill as a Roger Michell picture? Rather, most people will consider the first as primarily the product of the imagination of its star/screenwriter, Mike Myers, and the second as a recognisable continuation of the oeuvre of Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis (with a minority giving some credit to producer Duncan Kenworthy).
Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace is indubitably the product of the (rather turgid) imagination of George Lucas, but most people also think of the three previous Star Wars movies as Lucas's films: in fact, The Empire Strikes Back was directed by Irvin Kershner and Return of the Jedi by Richard Marquand. Lucas's great power and wealth derives from his work as a producer and as a visionary for a digital effects-driven future. The Star Wars cycle may be produced by a company called Lucasfilm, but by the standards of the believers in director-as-author, they're not all Lucas films.
That's not to say, of course, that films are not often the product of an identifiable, authorial voice, namely the writer-director, particularly when it comes to arthouse, European and independent filmmakers. Is it possible, therefore, to distinguish between the identifiably "authored" works of art made in an art-house/independent context and the commercial products which come from the Hollywood industry? Well, no, not really - film-makers like Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone and Ang Lee demonstrate that it's possible to work within the Hollywood system and retain a distinctive voice.
The idea of the lone visionary battling for his art is an attractive one and goes back a long way. "Despite these conditions of manufacture, the mass production, the obstinate committees, the uncreative producers, the horrors of the star system and the corrugated iron environment, there are occasions when a single film, the creation of one man's mind, makes its appearance. There are, in Hollywood, fortunately, men whose very personality over-rides the machinery," wrote the critic Paul Rotha in 1930. But this romantic construction of the artist-film-maker bravely expressing his vision takes little account of the many movies which cannot be so easily ascribed to a single voice.
"The problem of film authorship is not resolved and cannot be so, a priori," wrote the young critic Andre Bazin in 1943. "The facts of production are just too variable from work to work, for one to be able to accept the director as invariably the unique creator. The cinema is a team art. Each film requires of the critic an individual judgment concerning its authorship." Ironically, it was Bazin who, some years later, acted as mentor to the young critics who promulgated "la politique des auteurs" in such publications as Cahiers du Cinema and hailed previously unacknowledged Hollywood directors like Hitchcock, Hawks and Sirk as true artists.
At the time, the objectives of those critics, many of whom became leading film-makers of the French Nouvelle Vague, were making a radical intervention, but over time their ideas have become ossified into unquestioned assumptions about the film-making process. Jean-Luc Godard's statement in 1959 that "having it acknowledged that a film by Hitchcock, for example, is as important as a book by Aragon. Film authors, thanks to us, have finally entered the history of art," foreshadows our correspondents' complaint about our TV movie listings.
But when the American critic Andrew Sarris translated "la politique des auteurs" as "the auteur theory", he did a disservice to a phrase better understood as "a polemic for authors". The Cahiers du Cinema critics were obsessed with creating canons of directors who met their criteria for film-artists, and excluding those mere "metteurs-enscene" who just transferred a script to the screen.
The work of the French critics, and the vibrant art-house European cinema of the 1960s, fed back into American cinema in the form of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, with the emergence of directors such as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Arthur Penn. In contrast to what had gone before in Hollywood, these film-makers were hailed as artists in their own right by critics like Pauline Kael. By the mid-1980s, however, most of these directors had been marginalised. As Peter Biskind's recent book, Easy Rider, Raging Bulls, describes, many were brought low by their own hubris. Final Cut, Steven Bach's fascinating account of the filming of Michael Cimino's disastrously over-budget Heaven's Gate, vividly recreates the horror of the Hollywood establishment at what it saw as the rampant, uncontrollable directorial ego. Control was reasserted by the producers, and increasingly the agents (arguably the real forces behind modern studio film-making).
Within the film industry itself, the fear of the idea of director-as-artist is not restricted to America. Debates over the failure of European cinema to hold its audience share in the face of competition from Hollywood have often focused on "auteurism", used as a pejorative phrase by those who argue that the balance of creative control has shifted too far towards the writer-director, and that this has led to a self-indulgent solipsism, disconnected from the audience. The European Union-funded MEDIA programme, with its emphasis on improving writing, producing and business skills, is explicitly intended to redress this imbalance.
The auteurist film-maker is often depicted as the fly in the European ointment, a simplistic analysis of a complex problem which can never be solved by half-heartedly apeing the Americans. But one of the characteristics of European cinema is certainly that the director wields more power than is usually the case in America (an interesting partial exception is the UK, perhaps because the tradition of strong TV drama often gives priority to the screenwriter).
One of the key points of contention in the interminable wrangling between the EU and US over entertainment-related trade issues is the French insistence on the director's proprietorial rights as author of a film, an idea which is anathema to Hollywood, although it doesn't prevent the major studios from bandying around the word "art", and promoting much of their product as the work of artist-directors.
It is deeply ingrained in Western culture that, for something to be artistically "worthwhile", it must be the product of a singular, individual imagination. Developments in film theory over the past 30 years have questioned this construction of the director as artist, but the increasingly abstruse nature of academic writing on film means that it has little effect on the mainstream media and the way it covers film.
Bazin was right. Film-making is a collaborative art; in different circumstances there may be different levels of engagement from the key protagonists. Was a particularly striking shot conceived primarily by the director or by the cinematographer? Did the editor "save" a half-baked film in postproduction? Did the producer exert a right of final cut? We can never know how much input each has had, and we're unlikely to be enlightened by the self-serving publicity machines which accompany a film's release.
Film publicists and the media are complicit in promoting the idea of the director as sole author of a film - it makes for a more marketable, identifiable product, and feeds the print and electronic media's hunger for celebrity profiles. But, in the language of mainstream film reviewing, the name of the director is often nothing more than a shorthand for a complex, multi-layered process involving many individuals.
