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Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism

1990; University of California Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1212695

1533-8630

James Naremore,

Cinema and Media Studies

Film study in the United States owes a considerable and frequently acknowledged debt to the French romance with Hollywood auteurs during the late fifties and early sixties. From the time auteurism entered universities, however, it came under attack from both the right and the left, and it was soon displaced by successive waves of radical theory. Two forms of theoretical intervention exerted especially strong influence on the field. During the seventies, a conjuncture of Sausserian linguistics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis led to a rigorous investigation of the cinematic apparatus and its constructions of subjectivity. During the eighties, film theorists grew increasingly skeptical of authoritarian models of communication, and at the same time curious about popular reception or resistance--consequently we heard less about the poststructuralists and more about Gramsci, de Certeau, Bourdieu, and the British exponents of cultural studies. Today, the typical essay about film or television tends to swerve between two poles; on the one hand, it alludes to the ideologically pernicious, interpellating effects of Hollywood, and on the other, it argues that meaning is unstable, open to populist readings or poachings.' No matter which side of the argument it emphasizes, this sort of essay is usually concerned more with textuality than with authors or individual workers. Even so, as I shall indicate shortly, writing about directors hasn't disappeared, and discussion of authorship isn't incompatible with theory. In fact, given the current situation, which is also characterized by a renewed interest in history and the sociology of culture, a space has been opened for us to reconsider the contributions of the original auteurists, noticing a certain tendency of their work that's still relevant. I want to begin that reconsideration here, although I hasten to add that an essay of this size can't attempt a full-scale review. (Fortunately, we already have important studies of the topic by John Hess and Edward Buscombe, together with John Caughie's anthology, Ideas of Authorship, and Jim Hillier's annotated collection of writings from Cahiers du Cinema in the fifties and sixties.2) Instead of surveying the entire ground, I propose to glance back at the early criticism of Jean-Luc Godard, and then to say two or three things about the present scene. It isn't my intention to provoke a nostalgic revival of high auteurism, nor do I want to reinstall the analysis of directors at the center of film studies. Nevertheless, a brief look at Godard's critical strategies will enable me to challenge at least one hoary assumption about the auteurists. In addition, it will provide me with a starting point for some observations about a much larger issue: the paradoxical survival of the author in contemporary film criticism.