They’re talking about the “auteur theory” again over at girish’s place. Although this is over a week old, it’s still worth checking out; there are fresh comments today!

The auteur theory had it’s origins in the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Although critics such as editor André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc contributed to the notion, it all came together in a 1954 Cahiers article by François Truffaut entitled “a certain tendency in French cinema,” wherein he coined the phrase “la politique des auteurs” (the auteur policy). Basically, he advanced the notion that good directors imprint a style or a theme to each of their works that makes them unmistakably theirs. Like a lot of the critics of Cahiers (Jean-Luc Godard was one), Truffaut could be a provacateur, writing that there are no good or bad movies, just good or bad directors, and that the films of certain directors (Jean Renoir, for example) will always be better than those of others.

Andrew Sarris, the influential critic for The Village Voice popularized the notion in the United States in his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” To be considered an auteur, he maintained, a director had to have a competent technique, a strong personal style, and his films had to have “interior meaning,” whatever that means.

Auteurist critics like Sarris and Truffaut made a conscious decision to consider the director as the author of the film, and in their criticism they write mostly about the director. A lot of critics working today are of an auteurist bent, referring to a film as “Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers“ or “Peter Jackson’s King Kong.” Their pieces go on to compare the current picture with the others in the director’s oeuvre, spotting trends and stylistic tics, and giving screenwriting and producing relatively short shrift.

This, needless to say, has engendered a certain amount of hostility in screenwriters and producers, and that’s the jumping off point at girish’s: Josh Olson (screenwriter of A History of Violence) takes issue (in an exchange described here) with crediting director David Cronenberg for his work. About the auteurist issue, girish writes:

In my view, auteurism is not an account of how films are made. It is instead one among many ways we, as viewers, choose to read a film. In other words, it is one particular lens through which films can be viewed: by foregrounding the ‘marks’ of expression belonging to one person, the auteur, most frequently the director.

This notion of an interpretive lens appeals to a guy like me, who makes his living in part by applying interpretive lenses to texts. The auteurist notion of interpreting a film in terms of a director’s life history seems to me to correspond to the historical-critical methods of literary interpretation that flourished in the late 19th century. Opposed to that are the literary-critical methods, which tend to take a piece of literature at face value, and critique the text on its own terms, by what it says apart from the intentions of the author. Of course, in my own work (biblical criticism), I use a mixture of these techniques, viewing the text first through the authorial lens and then through literary lenses to examine what the piece says to a reader today.

Balanced film criticism would seem to necessitate both approaches, both lenses to write about a picture. It certainly matters how a director grew up, what she saw and experienced as as a child, but it also matters what the screenwriter experienced, and the cinematographer and the art director. The finished product is such an amalgam of their work that a literary approach seems increasingly appealing, and one that wouldn’t piss off the screenwriters quite so much.