This provides an interesting angle on the question of the auteur director, I think. Having said this, what fascinates me about Ellison's idea (and this is very much a part of his work broadly considered as well) is that the various elements that go into making art are an aspect of morality, and that the almost spiritual pressure to try to produce something worthwhile comes from the brute fact of the magnificence of the existing artistic tradition. Past a certain point, insistence on any theory as somehow fundamental becomes, for me, dull and pedantic. That is, they represent ways of seeing the world and of artworks, ways of interacting with these things, ways of getting at our intuitive responses to them and feelings about them. In these areas, I tend to take the line that – as Joseph Campbell once said about religion – theories, insofar as they are true, are true metaphorically.
#The enigma of kaspar hauser movie
Soon backlash arose in critical circles, where it was argued that thinking about a movie as the creation of a single auteur misunderstood the way movies are actually made, which is as a collaboration between many people – directors, actors, camera operators, producers, set designers, sound technicians, costumers, makeup artists, and many more – and also involves larger industrial and financial considerations interwoven through society.Įventually, like all academic issues, there were debates about the debates, and then debates about those debates in turn: Did the auteur theory, as it came to be known, privilege certain types of directors, and was it unequally applied (leaving out folks like B-movie and genre-film directors)? Did it privilege certain types of film, shifting our attention away from others that were equally worthy (like a Pixar animated film which doesn't lend itself to being read as the work of an auteur)? Was it inherently elitist, was it a function of a too-masculine viewpoint, did it mistake our culture for every culture, could movies be better understood and enjoyed without the notion that they were the result of some specific genius?Īs I said, I'm not much for concrete answers.
This was a novel idea that arose during the studio era, when people were accustomed to seeing movies as products of those studios rather than as the result of a specific director's vision. The earliest claim about it was based on the simple notion that certain directors made better films – in identifiable ways – than other directors.
The notion of the auteur director has a rich and complex history. But I do have an idea to throw into the mix. Definitive answers make little sense to me. I should say from the outset that I don’t have much of a stake in these debates. It's also a spacious word and one surrounded by a galaxy of debates. Spend much time around film critics, and you will inevitably find yourself running into the idea of the movie director as an auteur. Long sentences or short ones, rich description or sparse, uses of interiority, points of view, ways to challenge (or not challenge) the reader, methods of constructing a story – all of these and more are the tools with which writers spin a tale. It has different meanings for different people, but these tend to be centered on questions of style, structure, and approach. It's a spacious word – craft – and not an uncontroversial one.
Spend much time around novelists, and you will inevitably find yourself engaged in discussions about the craft of writing. Those are the standards.Lord knows it would be much easier if you didn't have to work out of a knowledge of what had gone before." They're the ones I have to measure myself against, not because I want to but because that's what is stuck up there. Every time I walk into my study or into another room of books down the hall I see the great masters. I think that this irritates some of the writers and makes them think: 'That guy, he thinks he's so good.' Well, that's not what I'm talking about.
"I suspect that I have annoyed a few people by insisting on the mastery of craft," Ralph Ellison noted to fellow writer James Alan McPherson in 1970.
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