The Auteur-As-Event

An insecurity that plagues cinema as an artform is the dogged question of authorship: that, when you 'boil down' to the 'essence' of a work, who is responsible for it, who is in command?

Because our default dogma today is to answer with 'the director', the figure who oversees most aspects of the project, whose personality over cast and crew sets 'the tone' for shooting, and whose ability to improvise and plan can steer the immense machinery of film as an industrial process into a manageable and coherent expression of a personal vision in greater or lesser intensity.

We have this dogma because of the heritage of silent film pioneers -- whose capacity to sell themselves competed with the burgeoning 'star system' -- and to the auteurism of the 50s and 60s, an international conspiracy of cinephiles who were set on putting the medium on co-equal terms with the high echelons of painting and poetry, and who saw in the director a Wagnerian will to design the universe contained within each film, and whose every effort could signal an aesthetic sea-change, and later, might prove 'revolutionary'.

And after the supposed 'death of the author' in the circles of critical theory during the later stages of the 20th century -- and after large corporations, digital effects teams, and a decreasing aesthetic dynamism -- the figure of the auteur remains unquestioned, and in fact has become the crucial signifier for how to separate 'quality' from 'slop' -- so much contained in a single name. Criterion releases of films have the director's name front-and-center alongside the title, regardless of their actual pedigree, and the celebration of a new film from those who we are 'fans' of can swerve from blind worship -- "He can't miss!" -- to enemy of the people -- "He only misses." The director is expected now to not only regard themselves as such a persona, but to address the 'concerns' that cinephiles have about them, and the presence or lack of this address can signal artistic progress or decline, all in the eye of the beholder -- meanwhile, the work itself goes on.

I have held the belief for a while but not said it in any coherent form, that we might be better off understanding the auteur, and thus all authorship, less as a discrete person -- although that is an important part -- and more as an 'event' that takes place.

Recently I had the fortune to read Rob Tregenza's interview at The Film Stage --

https://thefilmstage.com/all-great-dps-become-alcoholics-rob-tregenza-on-shooting-bela-tarrs-werckmeister-harmonies/

-- in which he goes into great detail what it entails to be a 'handmaiden' of the arts, a bridesmaid and not a bride, specifically in regards to Bela Tarr, whose reputation as a particular genius is easily said to outstrip Rob Tregenza's reputation as a curator, a director of photography, or as a director himself. Tregenza in short says that Tarr is less than the sum of his parts, that he was more dependent on his DPs for technical and aesthetic brilliance than is generally assumed, and that he cut less than an impressive figure once Tregenza got the chance to actually work with the man on Werckmeister Harmonies.

This violates our sacred ideal of what an 'auteur' should be -- the great Bela Tarr, dependent on the talents of others???

But how could this be the case otherwise? Tarr did not exist in a vacuum, as if anyone does, and the construction of his films is exceedingly complex to imagine, with the longer and longer takes making the prospect of each instance of filming into a fragile hope that all the performers are arranged just so, that the weather stays right, that the shooting locations remain the same, that the camera itself works -- the elegance of his tracking shots is always on the verge of disintegration, and it is impossible for one person to coordinate any of it, a team is required of professionals who know what they're doing, experts who are able to adapt to different conditions and input their own creativity into the production that Tarr has initiated, not because they're trying to violate his artistry, but precisely because they're wanting it to succeed. Even moving past major creative collaborators like DPs or editors -- the cook at craft services is responsible for food, the most basic input that allows any human labor to take place. If that cook decides to make this dish instead of that -- well, they are expressing an authorship that holds great consequence for the film, even if it is invisible to us as viewers.

What comes to mind for me now is Henry James, the great Anglo-American novelist, and how his later novels and stories -- and their radical departure from the conventions of Victorian realist fiction -- are not exactly solely accountable to an active decision on his part. His evolution in syntax was partly spurred on by his switch from writing by hand and then himself by typewriter, to then speaking his novels into existence by dictating to one of several secretaries: William MacAlpine, Mary Weld, and Theodora Bosanquet. It is clear that this became exceedingly easy for James to do, and his doorstoppers edged themselves into a distinctively proto-Modernist concern with consciousness because of this material evolution of his process, to the point that he made sure even his personal letters were dictated in this manner. To read the early James before he revised much of his work is to see most of his characters speaking in clear fashion, and for the narrative voice to be the clever third party beloved by readers -- to read the later James is to delve head-first into a maze, where each quickened impression betrays itself to another tremor of suspicion, where the narrator seems impossibly aware of every single diversion of experience, the halting stop-start pauses common to regular speech now transmuted through dictation into something strange and artificial.

In this instance, will we persist in saying that James is the sole author? It is his voice, his words, his ideas, but written down by another person's idea of how to arrange all of that, and that writing being done via the clipped precision of a typewriter. The argument could be made that the secretaries and the typewriter have equal claim to authorship, and it is evident to anyone who reads the work in comparison to his earlier efforts that this method had a radical effect on his whole style, to where James later entirely rewrote a novel like The Portrait of A Lady to 'fit' better into what he was doing during the early 20th century.

I say now that the answer to this question of authorship, auteurship, and all related quandaries, is that the figure of the author -- much like James' own 'figure in the carpet' -- is not really identifiable as a single person. It more resembles a spirit that inhabits people, a lingering spectre that more than a little resembles the Platonic daimon, that we are possessed on occasion by forces which then work through us to manifest certain things via our capacity to create in the material world. For what reason they do this, it is unknown, but I think any great artist will admit that they are never really 'in control' themselves, no matter how much they may wish to be -- to do the work that art demands requires an encounter with the variable elements found in nature and the fleeting half-understood impulses of consciousness.

Bela Tarr is a human being, but 'Bela Tarr', the auteur, is an organizational principle, a fiction in his own right, one whom is not the same as the man. The Auteur is the director, the cinematographer, the key grip, the audience, the weather forecast, the brick wall, the stock market, the dynastic squabbles of Ancient Egypt, and the rotation of the planet -- it is a confluence of trillions of circumstances that makes any work of cinema into what it is, how it is created and conditioned at a certain time by certain people and then seen by certain others over the coming years. The film and the Auteur are defined by the uneasy miracle that allows anything to happen at all, the presence of time and space, and they are constantly being altered by those elements in imperceptible ways.

Auteurism is given-over to the ready-made cliches of the personality cult, the Romantic 18th century ideal of the genius, but it seems to me to be altogether weirder the more we look into it -- the 'idea' of John Ford seems to have predated and superseded John Ford, the flesh and blood man, and that idea of his authorship persists despite mortality and entropy, just like how the 'idea' of the pyramids persists beyond our knowledge of who designed them, and for 'why' -- the work of art comes to integrate itself with a larger conception of artistry-as-such.

On the microcosmic end, authorship is so diffused into the infinite gradated background of reality that it becomes a nearly theological question -- on the macrocosmic end, authorship is so central to our perception of existence that it seems ridiculous to even speak of it. It is only in the 'middle ground' of everyday awareness that we debate the 'issue' of responsibility, which is ultimately a matter for typewriters and secretaries as much as it is for authors and auteurs. Because if we discard the mortal auteur and fail to expound upon him as an eternal Auteur, we end up either replacing him with ourselves -- the subject who is 'supposed to know' in critical discourse, armed against the mythology of the art-object -- or, we forsake art entirely in our quest to topple the idols that we have created. Because we make the world, too -- not always in film, or in writing, but most often on an regular affair, going to the grocery store, skipping a stone over a lake's surface, the small talk in the doctor's office.

Before we can respect and appreciate Auteurism, we should first ground our existence in the basic truth that we are authors of everything we experience, not finding it as we wanted, but making of it what we must, working through the medium we behold, and in doing so, shaping what we must become, that living owes itself to a creator, whether we know its name or not, we still feel the universal idea behind any particular manifestation, that the maker comes to resemble his tools as much as he uses them -- so if we choose to engage with cinema, we have to take on the responsibility for caring for it in the same way that a director does, to inhabit it, to admit that we don't totally recognize it, but that we might get closer to the world through the process of active participation.