Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Afterword

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scr.2011.0026

1549-3377

Leo Braudy,

Cinema and Media Studies

Afterword Leo Braudy (bio) Tout est provisoire, même le cinéma. Jean Renoir, 1972 In 1969 I made a proposal to Bill Whitehead, a young editor at Doubleday, for a book on Jean Renoir. The Film Society of Lincoln Center was running the most complete series of Renoir films ever shown in New York, I was in the middle of going to every one of them, loving them in all their intricacy and interconnections, and wanted to write about them. Sorry, said Bill, we (publishers in general, and Doubleday particularly because of the failure of the Cinema One series) think that books about individual directors have glutted the market, and we're not going to do any more. Give me something else. It was a semi-plausible response. The 1960s had been a fruitful time for books on film directors. Truffaut's original article on the auteur theory (in which Renoir had appeared prominently) had appeared in 1954. The critical baton was then picked up by the Movie group in England, and Andrew Sarris in the United States, much to the annoyance of Pauline Kael, the prime anti-auteurist among journalistic critics—although she would allow wide latitude to her own favorites like Robert Altman. But the change from books about film directors to books about films in general was hardly so abrupt. Joe Gelmis's The Director as Superstar (1970) focused primarily on American directors energized by the New Wave and even Peter Wollen's Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (1969 [American edition, 1972]), while heralding the future by championing a semiotic and structuralist approach to film, still devoted large sections of his book to the unique virtues of Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Yet the shift was already in process. As a harbinger of where academic film study was going, the first edition of Gerald Mast and Marshal Cohen's trail-blazing anthology Film Theory and Criticism (1974) generally stayed away from reprinting essays on directors, although with a nod to literary artistry they did include a section on Shakespeare and film, while the auteur theory was represented by essays from Sarris and Kael. A few years later, when Morris Dickstein and I published a director-oriented anthology of essays for Oxford in 1979, it sank like a stone. [End Page 126] With Whitehead's caveat in mind, then, I sat down and wrote up another proposal, oriented more toward a general approach to film, which would grow into The World in a Frame, in which Renoir played an important part as one of the great exemplars of what I called "open" films in contrast with the "closed" mode of Lang and Hitchcock. But by the time I got that proposal in shape and turned it in, publishing attitudes had again changed. Bill said that Doubleday was interested in director-oriented books once again, and so the two proposals were merged, with Jean Renoir coming out in 1972 and The World in a Frame in 1976. I start with this small excavation of my own history in film criticism to point up the shifting trends in the study of film that sometimes focus on and at other times devalue, even denigrate, the individual director. The culprit of course is that phoenix-like red herring (to mingle the mythic bird with the diversionary fish), the auteur theory. That it still raises hackles is evidenced by David Kipen's effort to counter it (in the wake of a 1975 book Talking Pictures by Richard Corliss and innumerable plaints from screenwriters over the years) in a book he called The Schreiber Theory (2006). Meanwhile, of course, others have championed the crucial aesthetic function of stars, cinematographers, producers, etc., while still others, like Thomas Schatz, point to what André Bazin called "the genius of the system." The excesses of the director-as-auteur view are certainly clear, as every boxed name of the director of a trivial film and every "a film by" credit shows. But it seems to have conveniently been forgotten that one reason Truffaut used the word "auteur" was to designate directors who also wrote their own films in whole or in part. Finally, though, all these...