On Auteurism

[Posted originally as part of a discussion in the comments section of girish shambu's blog]

To seize upon the notion of 'wholeness' as integral, if not essential, to the auteurist gospel...

As the cinema concerns itself always with the way we see, it seems to me that auteurism is or should be a matter of an object's integrity of vision. Here I use the word integrity as much in an historical, intertextual sense as an individual sense. Thus, when we see a Renoir film we engage not just an individual, abstracted-from-history Renoir but the Renoir situated in a certain area of space-time. As Tag Gallagher put it, it is a matter of feeling the presence of the auteur behind the work. This presence emerges not simply out of darkness - the greatest fallacy of misapplied auteurism is to assume that the film is just that sequence of images we see on the screen - but out of the chaos of history itself. We feel this presence engaging as an eye engages the world around it, attempting to encompass that world within its limited scope, and, depending on its ability, succeeding or failing forthwith. In this sense, all true auteur cinema not matter how plastic is great neo-realist cinema as well. It is a matter of trying to create a space which suspends the ideological and social tensions of a historical process, to open on the world.

The 'presence' of the auteur is manifested stylistically. The auteur is the style. He or she is the stuff of the films themselves. The auteur is not a mere individual - in that no individual is merely that - but everything that makes up the films, even much that seems alien within the frame, and all that is without the frame. Thus, biography, history, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis etc. - all of these are valid ways of describing and engaging the presence of the auteur. All is relevant, because all interweaves into and out of the text. Does it not enrich our experience of Ford to know that Ford's own mother was illiterate? To know that he watched Winslow Homer paint? Mizoguchi claimed that the cinema is essentially atmosphere. So the point of auteurism is to act as a first step in deepening our sense of what this atmosphere is, of what it means to refer to 'atmosphere'. Because atmosphere is not something that can be reduced to the sum of a film's formal mechanics - some scholars do not grasp this and so often stop short in their analyses just as the film is starting to reveal something of itself in their writing. This is not to say that atmosphere is more than style. For I have already submitted that the auteur is style, but style is also atmosphere. Style is not just an assembly of well-oiled parts, though it is most often and most effectively achieved this way. Essentially style is a glimpse of something greater, a way of seeing and encapsulating the ineffable experience of history. So the atmosphere that produced the films themselves from the ethno-capitalist paranoia that spawned Force of Evil to the consciously produced chaos that Rossellini perpetrated on his own sets for Stromboli and Voyage in Italy is part and parcel of what's on screen. We feel all of it as atmosphere. In great cinema, there is a presence, or better put an ocular consciousness which incorporates all around it, harmonizing multifarious contradictions. Yes, it is like magic or alchemy, an act akin to the sublime and the spiritual, if not exactly any of these.

Today, the fallacy of misapplied auteurism is a result of our own post-modern form of nihilism, a late capitalist notion of individuals as separate and self-determining entities rather than, shall we say, nodal entities. None of us are mere individuals. We are all ineluctably connected to the world around us. The auteur is a consciousness that can manifest this tension of whole but integrated individual in the space of the cinema screen. The contradiction that One can exist without every being only One - this is auteurism.