My latest article, which was published today, concerns the American writer-director Noah Baumbach and his new film of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, which won the National Book Award:
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/other-peoples-standards
It’s an attempt to say something general about a body of work – habits, obsessions, attributes, and weaknesses – through its latest addition, which unless the director has died or there’s some kind of retrospective – in publishing terms, the equivalent is an omnibus, or a premature biography, or something – is the only way of doing this kind of thing as journalism.
David Trotter’s recent piece on Andrea Arnold in the London Review of Books was an exception, and historically, when there were fewer voices and outlet, and perhaps – this is conjecture – when access to old movies was more limited, it was a kind of critical subgenre. The chronology is fairly complicated, and easy to caricature, but no-one could get too cross if you pointed to the founding in Paris in 1951 of Cahiers du Cinéma by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Lo Duca, and the development by their younger contributors, notably Truffaut, of a “policy” of celebrating certain directors as “auteurs,” with a strong authorial style and, in some cases, thematic preoccupations, and others as mere arrangers, shooters of scripts. There was some dispute over the validity of this approach, and of its chosen subjects, with Bazin – certainly the most important film critic on Cahiers, and perhaps anywhere – questioning the auteur concept and the kind of attention paid to, for example, Hitchcock. His preferred American directors were Welles and William Wyler, and he praised them in different terms, for their fulfilment of the cinema’s potential as a specifically realist art, through their use of deep-focus photography and long takes.
When elements of the auteur policy migrated across the Channel, the debt was to Truffaut’s polemical passion than Bazin’s scepticism (or philosophical emphases), though Ian Cameron, a recent Oxford graduate who founded the magazine Movie with three friends in London in 1962, sounded a note of English caution:
“On the whole we accept this cinema of directors, although without going to the farthest-out extremes of la politique des auteurs which makes it difficult to think of a bad director making a good film and almost impossible to think of a good director making a bad one.”
Movie published a number of exercises in this kind of analysis, notably V. F. Perkins on Nicholas Ray and Cameron’s own two-part account of Hitchcock. (This is a digression, but I’ll set it down as it has occurred to me: when Cameron was briefly the film critic of the Spectator, he received a letter from the novelist Winston Graham saying that his was the only review of Marnie which showed acquaintance with its literary source.)
In 1964, Peter Wollen another recent Oxford graduate, though not an associate of the Movie gang and more overtly political, began an informal series of essays on directors, using the name Lee Russell, because he was a fugitive.* (He also wrote on Iran, Italy, Indonesia, feminism, and psychoanalysis as Lucien Rey.) Russell’s first choices of subject could hardly have been more Cahiers-approved: Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir. He then did Kubrick, Ford, Malle, Boetticher, Hitchcock, von Sternberg, Rossellini. Ten articles, in four years, culminating in his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, written in 1968 and published the following year, an attempt to marry auteur criticism to structuralism, an approach he theorised in his final NLR piece written as Russell: https://newleftreview.org/issues/i49/articles/lee-russell-cinema-code-and-image
I am not aware of any lovers of film criticism sceptical of the Lee Russell canon. They are shrewd, bold, imaginative pieces, sociological to some degree, but with a warm responsiveness. (See a memorable paragraph on Renoir, which I have decided to put below as it is somewhat long.**) But there have been some legitimate questions about Wollen’s semiotic phase, lucidly expressed – that’s an understatement – by V F Perkins in “Film Authorship: The Premature Burial,” which I think is the best thing written on this subject, and contains some of the best writing about directors – passages on Welles, Ophuls, Hitchcock, Ford. It’s in the posthumous collection V F Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism, an extraordinary book which should have been more widely covered.
Perkins doesn’t mention Lee Russell – though I know he admired some of those pieces – but he begins in the 1950s, explaining why it took a while for serious writing about American directors to come about and also why it was necessary for some of the early moves to be a bit excessive. (He’s also notably empathetic when noting the shortcomings of Bazin’s realist theory in his classic Film a Film). Perkins notes that he could be “tetchy” when described as an auteurist, and argues that it is necessary to “observe a distinction between auteurism and other practices of director-centred criticism.” His basic problem with Wollen – and Andrew Sarris, the author of a famous 1962 auteurist essay, who I haven’t mentioned – is that he insists on continuity across a director’s work, partly because this is fundamental to the idea of auteurism (finding common ground, an authorial touch, in disparate films) but mainly because – this doesn’t apply to Sarris – his approach looks for recurrent binary oppositions of a ‘structural’ kind (nomad and settler, book and gun), with little to no interest in whether these were handled in an eloquent, subtle, or vivid way. There are so many wonderful bits in the essay – critical history, analysis of criticism, close reading of films, general characterisations of styles – but at one point, in the Wollen section, he provides an alternative way of doing things which I think is the most useful guide to doing this kind of work, one that’s hard to follow unless you’re as intelligent and committed as he was:
“The authorship discussion sets a context in which to ask what characterizes a director is to ask what is characteristic of his best work. What a director does well is at least as important as what he does often.”
*(Kind of. Read Simon Hammond’s magisterial essay for the facts https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii124/articles/simon-hammond-knight-s-moves)
** “Renoir recognizes the existence of social classes and nationalities—he is fascinated by them, as phenomena—but he insists that these differences need not divide men in their human essence. Thus masters and servants—their lives and escapades—have always humanly interacted and interlocked in Renoir’s world, though the two orders remain distinct. (Renoir has always preferred to depict master-servant relations than employer-worker: he is repelled by the anonymity of the factory.) Witness, for instance the conversation about harems between the marquis and the servant in La Regle du Jeu. The divisions which count are ‘spiritual’, not social, divisions. ‘My world is divided into miser and spendthrift, careless and cautious, master and slave, sly and sincere creator and copyist.’ (Master and slave, to Renoir, are spiritual categories—he uses ‘aristocrat’ in the same way.) Renoir is the spokesman for human values which capitalist society will destroy as far as it can—the values which Rousseau thought of as pre-social. He is confident that these values cannot be destroyed entirely, that there are spiritual recesses to which capitalism cannot reach, that human beings cannot be entirely dehumanized. Renoir believes that most people want no more than a simple, uncomplicated life; anything further is vanity, false pomp. This involves a renunciation of public life and a retreat into privacy, a flight from the central realities of an inhuman society to its human margins. It explains Renoir’s fascination with women, wandering players, gypsies, vagabonds, poachers and so on—all those who live in this human margin. Yet Renoir’s bonhomie—his open optimism—easily slips into buffoonery—a kind of hidden pessimism.”