Now that we’ve concluded our focus on different kinds of adaptations, we need to consider an important question that strikes at the heart of film adaptation studies. If we can conceive of an author in literature, then who is the author in film?
AUTHORSHIP
In literature, as in many other art forms, it is easy to identify the author. Stephen King. Ernest Hemingway. Toni Morrison. The cover of the book is adorned with one name, often given equal dimension to, and sometimes even greater than, the title itself. Though most novelists work with an editor who provides feedback and suggestions during or after the writing process, the novelist alone gets the credit. The work of fiction identifies itself as the result of one single author’s vision. The story’s success or failure rests solely with that author.
When it comes to cinematic adaptation studies, the author is a difficult concept to pin down. According to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, “The author can be thought of as a person, the actual agent (or agents) creating the text. Traditionally, this has raised problems of attribution, authentication, the relevance of biographical data and statements of intention, etc. In mass-produced cinema, which has traditionally involved collaborative labor, scholars have found it difficult to assign authorship to any individual.” Unlike literature or many other art forms, the film production process is highly collaborative. There is no single great genius sitting down in a room and emerging with a completed, solely executed vision. Any film requires the efforts of at least dozens, often hundreds, and as many as thousands of people, especially given the proliferation of digital effects that has increased the number of crew members and artists exponentially. Because film is a collaborative art, it can be difficult to assign any authorial responsibility to one particular film artist. For example, consider the following contributors from the perspective of their authorship: producers, who often generate ideas or secure financing for projects; directors, who guide the production with vision and ideas; cinematographers, who create the image, the most essential aspect of cinema; editors, who chain images together to create meaning, narrative, and pace; the screenwriters, who develop the blueprint for the story, control its escalation of drama, and write its dialogue; the actors, who inhabit the characters and connect with audiences through empathy and identification; the composers, whose music lends emotion to the narrative; the sound designers, who shape subjectivity through auditory cues and create a realistic environment; the costume designers, who outfit the actors with appropriate and meaningful wardrobe; the production designers and art directors, who build and decorate sets that will look realistic and expressive on camera; the studios, who give their films an identity and credibility; the special and visual effects teams, whose contributions are essential to many genres; the authors of source material upon which films are based, whose names and previous successes draw audiences; even the audiences themselves, who, thanks to the advent of social media and online forums, have more power than ever before to shape projects before they are made and judge them vocally after they are released.
The sheer volume of the number of possible contributors listed above should indicate that the concept of authorship in cinema is multi-faceted and difficult to narrow down. However, there has traditionally been one of these roles that has acquired authorial status above all others. Though a strong argument can be made for all of these collaborators, general consensus in cinematic study has gathered around the director as the person who is most often assigned authorial responsibility. There are a number of reasons for this, but the quick history goes back to a group of French critics writing in the aftermath of World War II. Because the war had disrupted the accessibility of films while the Nazis occupied France and embargoed all American films, these French critics missed out on several years of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Once the war was over and the embargo was lifted, they had some catching up to do. They started to notice that if they watched several films by the same director, they could identify similarities in style, theme, and genre. In seeking to raise the respectability of the art form they cherished, they began to think about cinema in relationship to literature, focusing their criticism on cinematic literary adaptations. The role of the author stood out to them as an underexplored idea in film. Eventually, led by critic Francois Truffaut, many of these writers came to embrace a concept that would come to be known as the auteur theory. Auteur, of course, means author.
Basically, the auteur theory argues that the film director is the one most responsible for a film. Truffaut and a number of his fellow critics published admiring essays about the filmmakers they considered auteurs: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and many more. In looking at their work, these French critics identified numerous stylistic consistencies across their movies that they suggested amounted to a kind of directorial signature, in the way that painters signed their work. They identified certain visual strategies, such as Welles’s preference for deep focus cinematography. They found meaning in Hitchcock’s tendency to work in the suspense and thriller genre. They admired Ford’s repeated collaborations with actors John Wayne and Henry Fonda. They appreciated the themes of male bonding and characterizations of women in Hawks’s work. There were other directors that these critics admired, but they were careful to assign the auteur label only to those filmmakers they thought were the absolute best. Good directors were fine—they may not necessarily be auteurs. Shots below: Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), top left; Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), top right; Ford's Stagecoach (1939), bottom left), Hawks's Red River (1948), bottom right.
Another factor accelerated the influence of the auteur idea: after writing about the concept in the pages of their French film magazines, a lot of those writers, including Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, put down their pens and picked up cameras—they became directors. After having spent a considerable part of their early careers advocating for the primacy of the directorial vision, they then set about making highly personal films that fulfilled the promise they made in writing. They became auteurs. The auteur idea has become extremely influential, traveling to America in the middle 1960s, where certain American writers (Andrew Sarris, Peter Wollen, among others) picked up the mantle and did their own analyses of cinema from an auteur perspective. It has shaped the way we think about directors today, especially because many have fashioned themselves as auteurs in a self-conscious way that would have been unthinkable to workmanlike directors Ford and Hawks, for example. This self-styled auteur process begins in the United States in the late 1960s, right about the time that a number of young directors, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and others, are starting to make films. They begin to think of themselves in the auteur mode—remember, these filmmakers would likely have been familiar with the idea, having been the first generation to study cinema in college, and they may have even read the original criticism advancing the idea written by the French.
A strong argument can be made for many filmmakers as auteurs if we take the most expansive definition of the term. The auteur theory is a useful framework for studying film adaptations and films that are not based on previous source material because it helps us identify the presence of an individual filmmaking voice behind the camera.
SPIKE LEE AS AUTEUR
For the purposes of our study, we are going to consider a pair of films by director Spike Lee, thinking about him as an auteur. Lee began his career in 1986 with She’s Gotta Have It, a small film shot mostly in black-and-white about a Brooklyn woman juggling relationships with three different men. From his debut, Lee established a clear framework for many of the films he would go on to make: New York settings; often politically charged; stylistically inventive; referential to other films and filmmakers; foregrounding the experiences of black Americans; wildly experimental in tone, narrative, and form; authentic to his vision.
Lee’s big breakthrough was 1989’s Do The Right Thing, a day-long examination of racial tensions on a block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn that explodes into a conflagration on the hottest day of the summer. The film is urgent and politically confrontational; its intense look at racial strife in New York City still has the power to shock.
After the success and acclaim of Do The Right Thing, despite some consternation from (white) film critics over the film’s radical final act, Lee forged a successful career that led him to make many different kinds of films. He explored racial issues through jazz in Mo Better Blues (1990) and romance in Jungle Fever (1991). His biopic Malcolm X (1992) renewed interest in the political leader, animated by a powerhouse performance by Denzel Washington. His outrageous satire Bamboozled (2000) brutally critiques representations of black Americans in the mainstream media. He looked back at the New York City of the 1970s with the serial killer story Summer of Sam (1999), and then turned his lens on the New York City of the post-9/11 era with 25th Hour (2002), the first major film to be made in the city after the attack on the World Trade Center. He made two staggering documentaries about New Orleans: When The Levees Broke (2006), which chronicles the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2011), which returns to the city at the height of the BP oil spill that took place in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. He made big budget heist movies like Inside Man (2006), and experimented with small films like Red Hook Summer (2012). He won near universal acclaim and an Academy Award for his screenplay for the undercover police thriller/comedy BlacKkKlansman (2018), which he also directed. He has likewise directed every episode of two seasons of a remake of She’s Gotta Have It for Netflix, where he will also soon release a film about Vietnam veterans, Da 5 Bloods, due out in 2020. Throughout his career, Lee has remained nimble, busy, and interested in using the cinematic form to tell urgent, politically-infused stories that force audiences to confront ideas that they would rather ignore. Lee refuses to let you pretend that everything is fine.
The images below from some of the films listed above (and others) indicate Lee’s visual style. He composes striking images infused with color, energy, and passion.
Stylistic flourishes dominate Lee’s work; he is particularly fond of what he calls “the double-dolly shot,” in which actors are placed on a moving cart along with the camera, and both are moved together. The characters appear to be floating through space; Lee reserves the shots for specific moments of intense emotion, and has used the device in nearly every film beginning with Mo Better Blues. The video at right shows the double-dolly shot in action.
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A number of Spike Lee’s directorial signatures can be seen in his 1995 film Clockers. The film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by crime writer Richard Price. It began life as a potential vehicle for Lee’s friend and mentor Martin Scorsese, who was originally going to direct the film with his longtime collaborator Robert De Niro starring in the role of police detective Rocco Klein, one of the novel’s main characters. As developed by Scorsese from Price’s script of his own novel, the film would have emphasized Klein as the main character, a deviation from the original work, which split the focus between the detective and the young drug dealer Strike. When Lee took over the project after Scorsese and De Niro began work on Casino (Scorsese stayed on as an executive producer), he decided to rewrite Price’s script, diminishing Klein’s importance in the story and shifting the emphasis to Strike, making him into the film’s unquestioned main character. Another longtime Scorsese collaborator, Harvey Keitel, plays Klein, and young actor Mekhi Phifer plays Strike. According to writer Paula Massood, “Lee’s change, however, expanded audience identification with (and thus sympathy for) a character traditionally left psychologically underdeveloped in most of the films focusing on similar protagonists.” Though Klein would remain an important character, the film is more interested in the effects of the drug dealing life on Strike, and empathizes with him as he struggles to navigate the dangerous world he has found himself in.
Massood argues that the shift in point of view demonstrates how Lee was interested in Strike’s situation far more than he cared about Klein’s investigation of the Darryl Adams killing that sets the story in motion. She says “Lee wanted to more thoroughly explore the trials and tribulations, the pressures and the motives behind Strike’s choice to clock rather than starting from the presumption that such a decision is made inevitably or comes ‘naturally.’ Furthermore, Lee’s film more fully and sympathetically acknowledges the effects of Strike’s and his crew’s presence on the surrounding community and, in particular, on his family and neighbors.” Lee also relocates Price’s setting (the novel takes place in Jersey City, New Jersey), placing the action in his native Brooklyn. Lee’s camera studies the housing projects where the drug dealers hang out in the courtyard, associating the characters with their environment in a critical way; this approach follows Lee’s fascination with the relationship between people and the city spaces they make their own, as seen in Do The Right Thing and which he would later explore in 25th Hour. Of the four images below, the top two show Strike and his fellow dealers hanging out in their courtyard; the bottom two show similar moments in Do The Right Thing (left) and 25th Hour (right).
Lee draws clear attention to the film’s political content during the opening credits sequence. This portion of the film offers an interesting point of comparison with other mediums, because the credits sequence is specific to cinema (and television), and has no analog in literature, poetry, or the theatre. As a result, the credits sequence creates an opportunity for filmmakers to begin telling their story even as the film is offering basic information about its key players. Lee’s opening credits sequences are often dynamic, as the beginning of Do The Right Thing demonstrates, with actress Rosie Perez (who plays Tina in the film) dancing to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” which becomes the theme song for the movie (top two images below). Lee’s opening credits sequence for 25th Hour begins inside the beams of light established as a memorial for the fallen World Trade Center towers before moving across the river to see the lights shining into the night sky, establishing the film’s elegiac tone (bottom two images below).
The credits sequence of Clockers is graphically violent, announcing the film’s subject matter from the start. It is going to focus intently on the costs of violence, especially the gun murders that affect primarily young black men in the Brooklyn projects where the film is set. It is an extraordinary opening to a film because it refuses to allow you, as an audience, to look away. Lee is never afraid to take a big swing; these images are aggressive and confrontational, unflinching in their depictions of bloody violence. They also foreshadow the film’s many killings, and contrast mightily with the gallows humor of the police as they stand over the dead body of Darryl Adams, making jokes about him as he lies murdered on the sidewalk.
The best argument for the auteur theory is a director's films, which reveal similarities upon further scrutiny. Watch the three video commentaries below on three Spike Lee films, Clockers, He Got Game (1997), and Chi-Raq (2015), which demonstrate how he uses various elements of style in his work.
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clip quiz - auteur theory and spike lee
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
INSIDE MAN (2006, Lee)
Spike Lee is a well-known New Yorker. How does he use the city in this opening credits sequence from Inside Man? What is his vision of the city, its people, and its architecture? |
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MO BETTER BLUES (1990, Lee)
In many of his films, Spike Lee uses very particular colors to communicate emotions. In this scene from his portrait of a jazz trumpet player, Mo Better Blues, where do you see such dramatic uses of color? What emotions do they communicate? |
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CROOKLYN (1994, Lee)
Many, though not all, of Spike Lee’s films focus on dynamics in and among Black Americans. In this scene from his family comedy-drama Crooklyn, which is partially autobiographical, where do you see his point of view come through? |
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MALCOLM X (1992, Lee)
Spike Lee’s films are known for their bracing political point of view as much as anything else. What political ideas are being communicated in this scene from Malcolm X, and how are they expressed visually? |
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kelly reichardt as auteur - certain women
Though she got her start as a director in the independent space in the middle 1990s, Kelly Reichardt had an extremely difficult time getting her career on track after the debut of her first feature, River of Grass (1994). Launching into the same environment that celebrated the releases of such independent films as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) did Reichardt no favors. Despite River of Grass earning accolades at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as from other organizations, it would take more than decade for her to secure financing to make a second feature film. Though the American independent cinema has been marginally more accommodating of traditionally marginalized voices, Reichardt’s difficulty in getting enough money to make another movie after a successful debut is testament to the high walls that exist even in that space.
In the years since, Reichardt has hit her stride, developing a reputation for quiet, contemplative films that focus on the relationship between people and the natural world they inhabit. She consistently explores themes of environmental disaster in her work, as in her thriller Night Moves (2013), in which three radical activists conspire to blow up a dam, a plot intended to wake a complacent public to the dangers of climate change. It doesn’t quite work out as they intend.
Elsewhere, Reichardt deconstructed the Western genre from a feminist point of view in Meek’s Cutoff (2010), inspired by a true story of a wagon train that wandered through the high desert country of Oregon on their way west, hopelessly led astray by a guide that lost his way; in Reichardt’s version, the guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), is a foolish blowhard given to exaggeration of his own supposedly legendary reputation as a guide and roughneck. Reichardt deliberately uses a 1.33:1 aspect ratio (rendering the film frame a kind of square) to reflect the limited authority of the group’s female characters; she thought the aspect ratio, instead of the typical rectangular widescreen that would no doubt have shown off the countryside, resembled the view the women have through the bonnets they wore around their heads.
But between the debut and subsequent thud of River of Grass and the more recent run of success, there was her sophomore feature Old Joy (2006). Like many of Reichardt’s other films, Old Joy is small in focus; two old friends, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), go off together on a camping trip, and find that their once strong bond has decayed considerably in the intervening years. The landscape of the Pacific Northwest is prominent, as it usually is in Reichardt’s films; shots of the massive forest emphasize the smallness of the two men as they struggle to bridge the emotional distance between them.
Reichardt’s films are notable for their prominent use of silence. According to critic Dana Stevens, writing on Night Moves, Reichardt “likes to use the cinematic equivalent of “white space”: extended periods of silence, for example, or individual shots and whole scenes that last just a beat longer than you expect.” There’s a lot of this in Old Joy, where many shots just follow Mark and Kurt as they trek through the forest. The idea is to ask audiences to sit and contemplate the characters, their relationship, the situation, the environment—anything. The whole point is to slow down and think about what’s on screen.
Above all, Reichardt’s tendency towards slowness is what makes her work a hallmark of American independent cinema. It’s not that her movies aren’t accessible; it’s that they move at their own pace entirely, which stands in direct contrast to the accelerated pace and loud noise of the mainstream American cinema of her era.
In Certain Women (2016), a trio of stories by fiction writer Maile Meloy are given cinematic treatment by Reichardt, who not only directs the film but also serves as film editor and the sole author of the screenplay; typically, she works alongside frequent collaborator Jon Raymond, who often serves as her co-writer, but in this particular film, she flies solo. If any film of Reichardt’s is a testament to her authorship, it’s this one, where she wears multiple hats.
In the first story, Laura Dern plays Laura, an attorney with a particularly difficult client, Will (Jared Harris), who insists that he has been cheated out of his rightful disability claim by the company that he worked for. Throughout the first third of the film, Reichardt finds moments of contemplation for Laura, as she decides just how much she wants to commit to helping Will pursue his increasingly desperate case.
That desperation reaches a breaking point when Will takes a clerk hostage at the company’s offices, and Laura is brought in to talk him out of the building without violence. The way this scene is handled is somewhat typical of Reichardt’s approach. While an ordinary filmmaker might take this opportunity for an intensely dramatic situation like a hostage crisis to jack up the formal theatrics, with intense music and fast cutting, she does almost the exact opposite. First off, she drops us into the action in the middle of it without explaining what’s going on, and then relies heavily on silence and very deliberate pacing when Laura actually goes inside the building and confronts Will. There is no cut back to the police, determinedly saying things like “If you get a clean shot, take it.” There is instead the open willingness to embrace the ordinariness that even tips into arguably outright boredom—that’s deliberate on her part.
In the second story, Reichardt’s frequent collaborator Michelle Williams plays Gina Lewis, a woman who is trying to convince the elderly Albert (Rene Auberjonois) to surrender a pile of displaced sandstones to her for use in a new home she is intending to build with her husband Ryan (James Le Gros), who is also having an affair with Laura, in one of the film’s tenuous links between the three stories. Many of Reichardt’s films focus on the relationship between the individual and the world around them, which she emphasizes mostly in this second story with shots of Gina and the surrounding landscape; in buying the disused stones from Albert, Gina thinks she is repurposing something that has fallen out of value and utility. What she doesn’t seem to realize is that she is corrupting their original purpose for a vanity project—they used to belong to a schoolhouse.
When Gina actually comes to collect the stones from Albert, who has reluctantly agreed to surrender them to her, she offers a polite wave to him from outside while she oversees the work being done. In the reverse shot, Albert looks on in contempt and refuses to return the gesture. This subtle emotional interaction is typical of Reichardt’s work, which often underplays significant moments between characters.
This approach also governs the third and lengthiest of the film’s stories, which follows the horse rancher Jamie (Lily Gladstone) in her unrequited love for lawyer Beth (Kristen Stewart), who is driving four hours from another part of Montana twice a week to teach a night class about school law, a subject in which she is not the slightest expert. Reichardt’s reserved visual style lets Stewart and Gladstone play their scenes in small gestures and quiet emotions; Stewart gives Beth an undeniable awkwardness and lack of self-awareness, as when she wipes her mouth with a napkin still wrapped around her silverware at the local diner. After Jamie has made a grand romantic gesture and brought one of her horses to escort Beth to their nightly dinner, and Beth sets off on her long drive back to the other end of the state, a soft close-up shows how much pain and longing is in Gladstone’s eyes.
Reichardt’s typical interest in the setting of the American northwest is on full display in Certain Women, which opens with vast landscape shots of the environment. She’s a filmmaker of the natural world, and her characters frequently find themselves standing in wide shots that emphasize their smallness in relationship to it. The emotional stakes, though, are usually quite high for them, despite the director’s typical tendency to encourage reservation.
There is also a repeated tendency to avoid the trappings of plot and melodrama. Late in the movie, after Jamie has made an ill-fated drive to a grand reunion with Beth after the teacher has quit her job, she falls asleep behind the wheel of her truck. Rather than offering a grandiose, tragic plot development like a car crash, the truck just rolls to a stop in the field. Jamie is fine, but emotionally and physically exhausted. That is typical of Reichardt’s cinema; the big thing seems like it might happen, and then it doesn’t.
Considering the auteur theory is an important part of thinking about the role of the author in cinema. It is one of the most important and influential of ideas in cinema history, which not only affects the way we see and interpret movies—through the visible personality of the director—but also the way movies themselves are made. Since the rise of the auteur theory, directors invariably consider themselves auteurs or aspiring auteurs, designing their films self-consciously to encourage audiences and critics to see them as great filmmakers with identifiable traits, obsessions, and themes. We will be studying Kelly Reichardt as an auteur, exploring her common themes and visual style through these films.