What is Auteurism and How did it Get Here? Part 2

Why Vulgar Auteurism is Bad Practice for GoodTrash Analysis

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about the origin story of Auteurism, it’s time we look at how it relates to GoodTrash and filmmaking in the 21st century.

French Auteurism has taken a similar turn as its American counterpart in recent years in its application to contemporary films. The theory has nearly exclusively been applied to aging directors who have moved from genre film to prestige pictures (such as Steven Spielberg or The Cohen Brothers) or to independent directors (such as Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino) making smaller, independent films. Another development, as in America, in France is the massive increase in blockbuster filmmaking. These types of film do no lend themselves easily to auteurist readings for reasons such as multiple screenwriters, studio intervention, and star personas. Factors scholar, Peter Wollen. refers to as “noise” that would distract from the voice of an auteur director. Despite this “noise” is not limited to blockbuster filmmaking due to the collaborative nature of filmmaking, auteurism remains a useful concept in cinema studies, though most often used is less “noisy” films. Though there have been some moves in film scholarship in America to bring an auteurist approach to blockbuster films, this has overwhelmingly not been the case internationally. It is my intention to bring auteurism to bear on “noisy” films.

I am not advocating for the rise of “vulgar auteurism”. This mostly English-Language development is the discussion of a great many blogs and film podcasts. The term was created by Andrew Tracy in an article in
CinemaScope titled “Vulgar Auteurism: The Case of Michael Mann” about his work in which the argument for auteur could be made for non-arthouse filmmakers with Mann serving as the privileged example. From there numerous articles have been spawned to argue that a critic’s favorite filmmaker should be added to the list of vulgar auteurs. I tend to agree with New Yorker writer, Richard Brody, in his article that though I am glad to see the canon opened up to new possibilities and think that auteurism as a practice (policy?) has tended to neglect filmmakers for the mainstream in favor of the avant-garde pole of contemporary cinema, but this term results in a confusing glut of auteurs. Brody quotes Godard:

“I am for the politique des auteurs, but not just anybody. Opening the door to absolutely everyone is very dangerous. Inflation threatens.”

I am all for finding a set of films whose study could be better served through examining the voice of the director regardless of the prestige level of the films. However, I find this new category, the vulgar auteur, to be unnecessary and unhelpful.

Some writers such as Peter Labuza try to make an intervention in auteurism through their use of the term. His intervention in terms of methodology moves away from auteurism altogether into a realm of formalist analysis which provides a fairly tenuous claim for an aesthetic connection between films by a director based on still images from the films. I have no problem with using aesthetics as a basis rather than narrative themes (nor did the original writers at Cahiers) for making the case for reading a set of films by this policy. However, we remain firmly in the realm of good, old-fashioned auteurism when we do so.

The reason why Vulgar Auteurism is really unhelpful is twofold. 1) As I mentioned above, it can dilute the idea of the auteur director. Not every director is an auteur. Rob Reiner has made some great movies because he know how to effectively tell a story. But I think a critic would be hard pressed to connect This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and A Few Good Men. I would not want to take anything away from what he has done, but this policy of analysis called auteurism simply does not lend itself to his work. 2) Vulgar Auteurism is really just auteurism with an unnecessary modifier. As we saw last week, it was always high-brow and low-brow directors for the gang at Cahiers du Cinema. Sure they had their Rossellini’s and Bergman’s but they also loved Howard Hawks and Sam Fuller and applied their model of analysis equally to all of them. Alfred Hitchcock is a key example as he straddles both poles. Certainly we credit him with some of the most important films in the history of cinema which certainly aspire to that level of greatness. But he also made (brilliantly) several fairly standard suspense films and spy thrillers. Had he only ever made films from one pole or the other, the policy of reading his films as a body of work unified by a single author would still be valid. Auteurism has always been vulgar as well as cultured. As has often been quipped we need to watch Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Claude Van Damme, but lets not pretend like this is a new idea, we are simply wrestling auteurism out of the hands of cultural snobs.

David Cronenberg was as much an auteur when he directed The Fly as he was making his moreprestigious films such as A Dangerous Method. John Carpenter is as much an auteur as recent rising wunderkind Shane Caruth. Frankly giving in by using the term vulgar gives up the ground won by the Cahiers crowd when they fought against the standard canon nearly seventy years ago!
There does seem to be a need to use some new tools in order to explore auteurism when it comes to GoodTrash-type films, however. Labuzza is correct to think that textual analysis of narrative is found lacking in Tony Scott or Michael Bay films. Yet there is definitely a connection intuited by watching their films as a body of work. What I am suggesting is that some (certainly not all!) of these so-called vulgar auteurs would be more fruitfully explored in terms of their industrial conditions rather than merely textual analysis. Certainly they have developed an audience as Corrigan describes in “The Commerce of Auteurism” which is why they have critical advocates attempting to elevate them. My exploration has led me to see an further development in the auteur of commerce and the commercialization of the director as celebrity. Furthermore our exploration of the development of the auteur theory has aided in explaining that the antipathy directors of GoodTrash fare experience has less to do with content than their anxieties about filmmakers who have brought their industrial commercial art to bear successful in the new market of globalization.

Next week we turn to my suggested intervention in auteurism: the auteur of globalization.