AUTEUR THEORY IN PRACTICE
Though auteur analysis has been incredibly influential, it is not without its limitations. According to author V.F. Perkins, “In the factory-like conditions of filmmaking the notion of the director as a sole creator, uniquely responsible for a picture’s qualities, defects, impact and meaning, must be approached with at least some caution. Because it is a collective enterprise, filmmaking involves many separate personalities, distinct and sometimes conflicting intentions, varying abilities and imperfect control. A movie cannot be fully and uniquely one man’s creation.” Most filmmakers know this; the film’s credits sequence does not assign authorial responsibility to one person alone, but acknowledges the sheer number of people who have contributed to the work. However, Perkins raises another objection to the credits sequence as a definitive representation of individual contributions: “The movies offer a constant challenge to connoisseurship. The credits supplied at the beginning of a picture are notoriously unreliable. Even when they are accurate they suggest a clearer demarcation of responsibility than exists among most filmmakers during most productions. They may lead us to credit the writer with dialogue or action improvised by the director or the performers. Conversely, they may result in our attributing to the director visual effects devised by the designer, photographer, or color consultant. Unless one has watched the planning and making of a picture, it is impossible to know precisely who contributed each idea or effect to the finished movie. We cannot, for example, tell to what extent the editing was foreseen by the director during filming, supervised by him in the cutting rooms, or left to the ingenuity of the man named as editor.” In Perkins’s estimation, it is extraordinarily difficult to assign authorial responsibility for any particular aspect of filmmaking because of the inherently collaborative nature of the medium.
This is one criticism of the auteur theory—the process of production is so complicated, how is it possible to assign authorial responsibility to any one collaborator, even the most influential and artistic directors? There are other critiques, however. Some critics worry that auteur-focused analysis privileges the role of the individual author too greatly and may fall into a kind of hero worship; such praise heaped upon an influential director can cloud judgment about whether that filmmaker’s individual efforts are good or not. In other words, if a director is a genius, what happens if he/she makes a bad film? Are you obligated to consider it in the context of the rest of the work, granting the genius status despite the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of an individual film?
Many filmmakers have had to fight for their place in the critical discourse, working hard to solidify their reputations as auteurs. It is undeniable that the auteur theory has also been very restrictive to certain kinds of filmmakers. For a long time, the only filmmakers who received the honored auteur status were white men, mostly because the critics who devised and then applied the label were themselves white men. The French critics’ Hall of Fame directors were all united by this commonality, and movements over the years have attempted to discredit the auteur theory because of its unrepresentativeness. Other film critics have tried to go the other way, lobbying on behalf of female directors, queer cinema pioneers, or filmmakers of color, conferring auteur status upon them. In addition to an expansion of the auteur label to a number of important filmmakers of the 1970s, other critics have tried to argue for Lee (1989's Do The Right Thing, top left); Sofia Coppola (2003's Lost in Translation, top right); Kelly Reichardt (2013's Night Moves, bottom right); and Todd Haynes (2002's Far From Heaven, bottom left), among others. This approach seeks to expand the auteur theory to those who have traditionally been denied authorship status.
Ultimately, the auteur theory is a useful, if flawed, framework for understanding the role of the author in cinema. It began as an attempt to discover the author’s voice in film in the context of film adaptation, and has become an influential way of thinking about movies. It has played a major role in raising general audiences’ awareness of directors as guiding forces behind films, much more so than in the eras preceding the auteur theory, when audiences might have known one or two notable directors, but now know many more. It also helped to shape the discussion around cinema as an art form; focusing on the director allowed film critics and audiences to isolate cinema’s great artists, legitimizing the medium as an art form worthy of study.
clip quiz - auteur theory in practice: kelly reichardt
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
OLD JOY (2006, Reichardt)
What mood does director Kelly Reichardt establish in this clip from Old Joy, and how does she do it? |
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WENDY & LUCY (2008, Reichardt)
Directors often work with the same performers over and over again; in Wendy & Lucy, Reichardt uses Michelle Williams in one of the title roles (the other is a dog). How do Williams and Reichardt work together? What kinds of characters does Williams play for Reichardt? |
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MEEK'S CUTOFF (2010, Reichardt)
Describe Kelly Reichardt’s visual style, using this clip from her Western Meek’s Cutoff. How does she typically use the camera? How would you characterize the kinds of shots she tends to compose? What would you say about her usual approach to editing? |
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NIGHT MOVES (2013, Reichardt)
What role does setting play in Reichardt’s films, using this clip from her eco-thriller Night Moves as an example? |
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kelly reichardt as auteur - showing up
In 2021, director Kelly Reichardt released two short films that offer portraits of two very different artists at work. In the first, Bronx, New York, November 2019, she visits the studio of Michell Segre, an artist who makes massive sculptures out of a combination of yarn and found objects. In the second, Cal State Long Beach, CA, January 2020, she watches artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who does small sculptures made of clay. In both films, the camera silently observes the artists in their painstaking approaches to their crafts.
These two films are really dry runs for Reichardt’s 2022 feature Showing Up, which stars frequent collaborator Michelle Williams as Lizzy, a potter and sculptor who works out of her garage while also working as an administrative assistant in the office of a local arts college (where her mother happens to be a dean). Lizzy is frustrated by her lack of recognition, but is also unwilling to make trouble, and so she doesn’t do anything about it.
Another source of frustration is Lizzy’s more successful comrade Jo (Hong Chau), who is also her careless and inattentive landlord; not only is Jo a much bigger deal as an artist, she also keeps putting off fixing Lizzy’s hot water, and takes in a bird that has been injured by Lizzy’s cat, only to get too busy putting her new art show together, and then dumps the bird on Lizzy, who is too polite and insecure to refuse.
Reichardt works often with Williams, and this film continues their exploration of complicated, flawed women who struggle to define themselves against the people around them. Their first pairing came with 2008’s Wendy and Lucy, in which Williams plays Wendy, a woman who is living out of her car with her dog Lucy when she gets stranded in Portland on her way to Alaska; she’s running from something, a backstory that Reichardt never provides in detail.
In the commentary at right, you can see a scene from Wendy & Lucy, in which Reichardt establishes close identification with Williams’s character. As you watch, pay close attention to the ways in which Williams embodies the character, and how Reichardt’s use of the camera builds a relationship between her and the audience through her choices in film form.
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While life for Lizzy is nowhere near as hard as it is for Wendy & Lucy’s character, Showing Up is also about the unglamorous day-to-day work of an artist who is struggling to get by and feel creatively fulfilled. Lizzy does not exist in a vacuum where she can make art and not worry about anything else; she has to work a job she doesn’t really like, while also navigating difficult relationships with her family. She has unresolved issues with her father (Judd Hirsch), and though she sees her mother (Maryann Plunkett) every day at the office, their connection is more like employer/employee than mother and daughter, as when Lizzy practically has to beg for a day off to finish her work for the art show.
On top of that, though, is her increasingly strained relationship with her brother Sean (John Magaro), who lives alone and is slipping into some kind of mental health crisis that no one else in her family seems willing to acknowledge. As with most Reichardt protagonists, Lizzy struggles between her comfort in isolation, which allows her to concentrate on her artistic work, and her ambivalent relationship with the people around her, some of whom she wants to connect to, but many of which simply frustrate her.
Showing Up is another example of Reichardt’s interest in a character’s alienation; though not as extreme as her Western Meek’s Cutoff (2010), in which a group of settlers moving west through the high desert of Oregon get hopelessly lost.
In the commentary at right from a scene in Meek’s Cutoff, you will once again see Michelle Williams, there playing Emily Tetherow, one of the traveling party; this time, though, Reichardt deliberately emphasizes the distance between the men who are making the decisions for the group and the women who are excluded from them. Once again, she is highly attentive to film form; in the scene, you’ll see how she does that and to what thematic purpose.
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The authorship of Showing Up is perhaps a bit more complicated to untangle than in many other Reichardt films. First of all, the film is co-written by Jon Raymond, who regularly shares screenplay credit with Reichardt and is a frequent collaborator, working with her on nearly all her films. Certainly Williams has a claim to authorship, working repeatedly as she does with Reichardt, but her performance as Lizzy is the emotional anchor of the movie. Christopher Blauvelt is behind the camera as the cinematographer, as he frequently is for Reichardt, as well, giving the film its distinct look. We also have to consider the authorial role of artist Michell Segre, whose work stands in for Jo’s; so too must we consider Cynthia Lahti, who did the sculptures for Lizzy’s character.
Interestingly, Showing Up is really about this tension at its core. At a crucial moment, Lizzy submits her favorite of her sculptures of the female form to be fired in the kiln at the school by fellow professor Eric (Andre Benjamin); when she comes to get it, she discovers that it has been burned from being too close to the fire, which streaks it with a distinctive black mark. Though it does not come out as Lizzy intended, everyone else seems to like it the way it is. In art, accidents sometimes are the most interesting thing that can happen—how does a theory of authorship account for those?
The auteur idea is not above criticism. Ultimately, it is an influential and useful framework for studying film that privileges the role of the director. However, an overly restrictive allegiance to auteurism can lead to ossification: what is a director to do when he/she wants to branch out? Long-standing perceptions over the director’s strengths and limitations can foreclose interpretive possibilities, leading audiences and critics alike to see new films only from pre-formed perspectives. Those who have already made up their minds about his work might have missed an opportunity to see how the artist has changed or grown over time. In the context of adaptation, considering the role of the author on screen is challenging; the auteur idea provides a useful, if imperfect, template for doing so.