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Sign Your Name Across My Heart, or: |
 Edgar G. Ulmer |
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Introduction: This text was
originally written to introduce a special dossier that I guest-edited titled Auteurism 2001, which ran across two
issues of the scholarly journal Screening
the Past online (in 2001!). I have now lightly edited the piece to make it
less of an intro and more of a stand-alone essay; in this revised form, it may
hold some interest or even relevance in a 2020 context where auteurism is once
again – for some new reasons, in a different historical context – undergoing
sustained attacks, not all of them well-judged or well-aimed, in my opinion. For
me personally, the (sympathetic) evaluation of auteurism and its critical
legacy was an already old, recurring, even obsessive project; my notebooks tell
me I first began sketching it out as Auteurism
1988! The essay below picks up and elaborates themes from my short, serial
reflection of January 1999, “On Auteurism”. I also returned to the topic in course lectures from 2007 & 2009 at Monash
University, fragments of which I have incorporated here. Some of the texts
mentioned in passing are those belonging to the Screening the Past dossier, but take note: due to complicated
technical and institutional reasons, the complete archive of this estimable
journal is not yet properly or easily accessible online through the site
itself; however, a Google search for specific articles keyed to the journal’s
official URL – http://www.screeningthepast.com/ – will bring up a possibly not entirely correctly formatted but otherwise
consultable version of that text. (There are, alas, no index pages on that site
yet for the two issues containing Auteurism
2001.) Let us hope and pray that, one day, the complete contents of this
important Australian publication (from 1997 to the present) will be fully
restored online in corrected and properly documented form. All serious
volunteers are welcome to help! – contact me via this website. (13 September
2020)
I am speaking of the auteur in a strict
sense of the term: the auteur of literary or artistic works. Not the auteur of
a crime, or a theorem, or even the Universe.
– Marc Le Bot (1)
E.
Elias Merhige’s Shadow
of the Vampire (2000) stages an elaborate conceit from an imaginary
or speculative history of film. Nosferatu (1922) is being shot, and no one except the director knows that the actor
playing the title role, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is really a vampire. With a
gleeful disregard for the chronology of global art movements, Merhige and
writer Steven Katz present this fiendish pact as Method acting gone mad – their
recreated Nosferatu, in its process
of unbecoming, anticipates postwar psychodrama, a confusion of art and life,
performance and reality. On this surface level, Shadow of the Vampire has more in common with contemporary movies
about the filming of violence (like Man
Bites Dog [Belgium 1992]) or sex (Boogie Nights [1997]) than with the heyday of
German Expressionism.
But
Merhige’s fantasia becomes more resonant when considered as being primarily
about its director figure, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931). For the
purposes of this movie, who is Murnau – or, more precisely, what image of the
auteur does he allow us to entertain? Merhige and Katz seamlessly layer several
such images. Murnau the great artist, the visionary, painstakingly talking his
actors through each scene. Murnau the dandy-eccentric. Murnau the on-set
tyrant. Murnau the international man of mystery and myth – a media celebrity of
his day, whose guarding of privacy led to the proliferation of rumours about
his spiritualist and occult practices, his Eastern philosophical beliefs, and
his mooted bisexuality. John Malkovich – an actor who increasingly gravitates
towards non-psychological modes of performance in films by Raúl Ruiz,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Manoel de Oliveira and the like – projects with
unerring accuracy the pure presence of a tabula
rasa upon which this palimpsest of marks identifying “Murnau” can be
inscribed.
So
we have the fiction of Murnau – like Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang, a
filmmaker whose life easily transmits itself to contemporary biographers as a
juicy roman (as in “novel”) full of
intrigue (the French title of Bernard Eisenschitz’s splendid book is Roman américain: les vies de Nicholas Ray).
(2) But there is a deeper, almost allegorical level to this tale, since the
contemplation of Murnau – again like Hitchcock or Lang – inevitably generates a
meditation upon the cinematic apparatus itself, in the terms sketched by Thomas
Elsaesser:
... the act of seeing, the constraints and
power-relations it gave rise to, appeared so uncannily foregrounded that the
action always tended to become an adumbration or metaphor of the more
fundamental relation between spectator and mise
en scène, audience and (invisible, because reified) director. (3)
In
this light, Shadow of the Vampire is
a particular variant of the films-about-filmmaking genre – it is a tale of the irrevocably “haunted screen” (the title of Lotte Eisner’s
book on German Expressionist cinema). (4) Cinema as through and through the
medium of the uncanny and the undead, like Vernon Zimmerman’s Fade to Black (1980) or Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995). This is what the fictive Murnau’s realism – or, more authentically, the real Murnau’s aesthetic theories of animism (“What I refer to is the fluid
architecture of bodies with blood in their veins [...] the formation and
destruction of a hitherto unsuspected life”) (5) – trigger: an allegory of the
cinema as vampiric, that which recreates the life of the world by, at the
outset, capturing and draining it. This is the true vampire’s shadow cast in
the title. And, in its apocalyptic ending, this fantasia joins up with at least
one other biographical testament to filmmaking as inexorable, immoral tragedy –
Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). Both films end with the solemn ritual of the director-figure as dark
demiurge intoning “action” or “cut”, as if that unreeling of celluloid within a
camera was driven less by mechanics than by the Faustian pact secured by the
compulsive vision or Will of an auteur.
There
is one further layer to this game of mirrors, since Merhige, as director of the
film we are watching, can hardly avoid entering into a simultaneously delighted
and troubled relationship of identification with his seductive, demonic, driven
hero. Merhige wisely does not attempt a too-close mimicry of Murnau’s style for
the presentation of his own tale (as distinct from the carefully mocked-up bits
of Nosferatu, reminiscent in their
hyperreality of Tim Burton’s A-movie pastiches of Z-movie style in Ed Wood [1994]). But, all the same, his sense of rhythm, of staging action, and
especially of framing – for the fictive Murnau and perhaps also for his real
model, only that which comes inside the force-field of the static, immaculately
worked frame is truly alive – owes a
lot to the Master. Merhige – whose gruelling experimental feature Begotten (1991) conjured an obscure,
primal, mythic violence and resembled (as the director put it) a piece of
refuse dug up from deep below the earth – has found a path to fiction,
character and the cool, thoughtful layering of subjective and objective
perspectives through his disquieting exchange with the spirit of an imagined
Murnau.
* * *
There
is invariably a strange and charming alienation effect when one revisits the
hot polemics of an earlier period. In 1974, American film and literature scholar
Charles W. Eckert (1927-1976), noting “the disintegration of the whole
formalist-idealist endeavour” in cinema studies, dramatically observed that “there
is a stiff, cold wind blowing against partial, outmoded, or theoretically
unsound forms of film criticism – and it might just blow many of them away”.
(6) This was an early bulletin in the Anglo-American film theory revolution.
Eckert’s prognosis about the state of his field already equivocated between a
sense of intellectual euphoria and a dread of professional fatigue; between the
thrill of a terrorism that one might be in a position to inflict, and the fear
of a terrorism that one might too easily end up in a position to suffer:
[F]ilm study is becoming increasingly
demanding, just in terms of the organisation of one’s work, since everything
needs to be pursued at once, presented at once, theoretically validated as it is presented, and subjected to scrutiny
in terms of one’s motivations for establishing categories and arriving at solutions (which in turn, in the interest of
truth, must be converted into problems of a new order). But maybe this is where
film study is, since we are increasingly intolerant of self-serving narrowings
of the field of inquiry (“I want to write about Delbert Mann”) and expedient
defenses for methods of study which “get results”. [p. 65]
It
has become a standard editorial move for any positively inflected collection on
an apparently old theme – such as style, aesthetics, genre or auteurism – to
herald itself as part of the heroic return of that particular, unfairly
forgotten or suppressed topic to the agenda of professional cinema studies.
While I would like to cloak my reflection here with the paradoxical glamour of
an old-but-new wave, I am not sure that this description would be exactly apt
or true. Auteurism, although it has been strongly challenged in theory, has
never really gone away in practice. And it proceeds in a largely unsystematic
and impulsive way, from one manifestation to the next, because cinema studies (if
we can even meaningfully cohere that as a field) seems to me more ad hoc, less
programmatic and agenda-driven, than is sometimes assumed (or wished). Cinema
studies, taken globally and in all its forms (including those that go on
outside universities) is not one mind with a Will and a single direction; nor
can its manifestations be exhausted in the image of the bloody clash-by-night
of a number of major schools of thought.
I
begin from an unpolemical aim: to survey what is going on at present in the
domain of what could be called auteurism or (less colourfully) director studies
– those critical, historical and theoretical works which, in whatever way, take
the film director as the organising centre of their analyses. As it organically
unfolded into something more than an impartial map of current work, the
collection of piece I gathered for Screening
the Past formed itself into an obsessive investigation of often obscure
impulses: those of auteurs, and those of auteurists. And, given the
open-endedness of these impulses, plus the multiple uses to which they can be
put, mightn’t the statement “I want to write about Delbert Mann” be a valid
starting point (as valid as any other, at any rate), after all?
Boiled
down to its essentials, classical auteurism is a quite simple principle, with
two emphases. First, it is a proposition about the making of films: that a film’s director can be rightly pinpointed
as the one most (note: not exclusively) responsible for its art and
craft. Second, it is a statement about understanding films: that one good way to explore and interpret films is through focusing on
the signature or traces of the director’s style, “vision” and recurring
concerns. Not necessarily, in every instance the best or only way – although it
may have sometimes and in some places seemed so during the 1950s or ‘60s – but
an enabling way, nonetheless. As Tag Gallagher suggests,
the “utility for regarding a director as auteur is the richness of experience
that may result”. Such passionate engagement with an auteur – by whatever means
we construe him or her in our minds – can be about something grander than
simply (in Eckert’s terms) just “getting results”.
Of
course auteurism, like any method or theory whatsoever, has indeed produced
many rote analyses and responses – dry structuralist tabulations of motifs,
banal notations of recurring material, unimaginative interrelations of style to
content. What auteurism sometimes presumed to discover, in its most naive
moments, and attributed to the one-and-only genius of a director, was often in
fact more readily derived from convention, genre or the wider culture. This is
why auteurism, at the points where it eroded and got swept under a carpet,
easily gave way to a historical poetics of cinema, to cultural studies, and to
the sociological analysis of studios, eras and national imaginaries. This was
the programmatic move announced by Peter Wollen in the revised, 1972 edition of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, in
terms that were both theoretically driven and pragmatic: “I do not believe that
development of auteur analyses of Hollywood films is any longer a first
priority”. (7)
But
personally, taking the long view of global cinema criticism, I cannot doubt
that writing about directors has been, and continues to be, among the most
searching and satisfying approaches to this medium. Something more than a mere “principle”
– and certainly something other than an expedient defense for a method of study
that gets results – has to be at stake here. I am reminded again of Elsaesser’s
reflection (cited above) on the past, present and future of auteurism:
The auteur is the fiction, the necessary
fiction one might add, become flesh and historical in the director, for the
name of a pleasure that seems to have no substitute in the sobered-up deconstructions
of the authorless voice of ideology. [p. 11]
In
fact, one way to schematise the current range of director studies – and to map
the diverse impulses underlying it – is to imagine the auteur in two quite
different forms: as a real, historically determinate individual; and as an
abstraction, a “fiction”, an image. Neither approach is necessarily truer than
the other; both are enabling mechanisms for serious, detailed work. And we do
not need to set these conceptions up in polemical opposition to each other;
they are often intertwined.
Many
attacks on auteurism inflated the perceived enemy created by its “formalist-idealist”
methodology into something truly fantastic: the director/auteur not as worker,
artisan or wily operator, but a dreaded Romantic Individual of the kind that
can only exist in myth. In practice, even those who launched the missiles of
anti-auteurist rhetoric tended to proceed with critical business as usual: few
ever stopped speaking of Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Campion, Hitchcock, Agnès Varda
or John Cassavetes as if they were no longer in charge of the movies they
signed. This is also the case for the more contemporary flamboyant gestures of
anti-auteurism issuing from directors themselves – as in the Danish Dogme
manifesto, which decrees that films made under its aegis be anonymous –
instantly reassigned by popular journalism and criticism alike as quirky
directorial postures and statements.
Emerging
from this fog, some now seek to understand the materiality of creative and
industrial processes: how a director’s vision is formed in collaboration with
others, and how it is subject to many kinds of decisively constraining and
shaping influences. This is the domain of “explaining how they’re made”, what
William Routt labeled a “cine-pragmatics” reflected in Stephen Frears’ credo as
a filmmaker: “All problems are technical”. (8) Thus, in the Screening the Past dossier, Roger
Hillman explores the collaboration between Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his
regular composer, Peer Raben; while Chika Kinoshita proposes a new way of
understanding the working relationship between Kenji Mizoguchi and his
favourite actor, Kinuyo Tanaka. The question of influence – and the recasting
of sources from art, literature, music and philosophy – is taken up by Gino
Moliterno in his treatment of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1985).
By
the same token, a number of analyses – such as Brad Stevens on James Toback and
Sue Gillett on Campion – for the most part invoke, in that old-fashioned way,
only the name of the central auteur. And why not? Support for such an invocation
comes from Gilles Deleuze who (in the following assemblage of three separate
quotations) offers an intriguing defense of a history of philosophy – or cinema
– based on a parade of “proper names”:
I recognise the name of Kant not in his
life, but in a certain type of concepts signed Kant. Henceforth, one can very
well conceive of being the disciple of
a philosopher. If you are situated so that you say that such and such a
philosopher signed the concepts for which you feel a need, then you can become
Kantian, Leibnizian, etc.
If concepts are the object of a creation,
then one must say that these concepts are signed. There is a signature, not
that the signature establishes a link between the concept and the philosopher
who created it. Rather the concepts themselves are
signatures.
The great directors of the cinema may be
compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also
with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of
concepts. (...) [the cinema] forms part
of art and part of thought, in the irreplaceable, autonomous forms which these directors were able to invent and
get screened, in spite of everything. (9)
Auteurist
criticism has long spoken of the personal visions and world-views of directors,
and this noble tradition is continued in the work of Gallagher on Edgar Ulmer
or George Kouvaros on Cassavetes. Deleuze’s approach strengthens this
apprehension: the concepts which an artist thinks with and through are
creative; they conjure and constitute entire, unique, self-contained worlds
that run on distinct, at times surreal logics. Such an entering into personal
worlds inevitably leads writers into excavating long-ignored aspects of
aesthetics, stylistics and mise en scène:
Ulmer’s incandescent lighting; Cassavetes’ volatile framing of human gesture; or
Jacques Becker’s ear for sounds and rhythms.
These
less-written-about figures indicate another drive of contemporary auteurism: to
get past the constrictions of earnest canons and unbending mantra enumerating a
mere handful of “greats” (a constriction to which even the works of Wollen and
Deleuze are sometimes prone), and re-find the vital energy and exploratory
drive of the auteurist endeavour before it ossified into its classic “pantheon”
manifestation. A prominent aspect of this revitalisation of auteurism is the
study of contemporary directors (such as Paul Verhoeven) who themselves cagily
gleefully intervene into given forms and genres.
Deleuze
chooses to sever the link between signature and person in invoking an auteur’s
creation. This, too, is familiar from a tradition in film theory and criticism.
It signals that line of thinking which derives from Michel Foucault’s
meditation on the author function,
the circulation of an author not as biographical entity but as name or
commodity. One kind of work that has branched out from this insight is
historical and materialist: analyses of the making of reputations (Hitchcock, Robert
Bresson), the “historical subject” (such as R.W: Fassbinder), or celebrity
images (Cecil B. De Mille, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges). (10)
Another
kind of work on signature is poststructuralist: the signature floating free,
borne on the waves of image, sound and writing – that last term understood in
its most forceful and active sense of écriture.
Tom Gunning’s 2000 book on Fritz Lang
(which deftly mixes historical-materialist and poststructuralist modes) begins
with the paradox of this emblem of the auteur’s signature – Lang often used
inserts of his own, writing hand in his films – in order to trace the loss of the auteur (and his megalomanical,
enunciative control) in the worldly eventuality of the work produced. (11) William Routt has further explored this paradox by examining the legacy of Lois
Weber through the concepts offered by Maurice Blanchot on the “exigency of
writing”.
Dana
Polan, for his part, directs our attention to the doubleness of desire in
auteurism: there is desire of the
auteur, and desire for the auteur.
And thus, if the director is at one level a fiction or phantasm, we inevitably
and necessarily come to examine the critic and the various, complex investments
that are made by him or her in the desiring creation of auteurs. There is a range of responses to the question of
what this desire might entail. Ken Mogg’s essay on The Birds (1963) and recent
commentary upon it looks for a way of grounding discussion of Hitchcock in a
method that is not merely piecemeal or opportunistic – Eckert’s blast at “self-serving
narrowings of the field of inquiry” finally comes home to roost – but apt,
exact, encompassing, and existentially truthful,
including being as true as possible to what we know of the work practices and
sensibility of the director. Mogg thus finds his most faithful mirror for
Hitchcock in the philosophical writings of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Brad
Stevens offers a distinctive twist in this labyrinth of desire when he suggests
that “we cinephiles are nothing more than the wandering ghosts of those
mythical popular audiences who once visited the cinema regularly” – implying
again, like Elsaesser, that the auteur may be the “name of a pleasure” rather
than the name of a person. And, in this light, we can equally understand the
practice of other writers, no less on the track of understanding this enigmatic
and elusive pleasure of the movies, wanting to displace the name of the author,
which they envisage as a blockage of critical flow: “My own analyses nowadays
almost always place ‘the film’ where the name of the director used to be placed
(...) The author is the identity we can do without” (Routt). (12) Or consider
this statement by Philip Brophy, one of the most thoroughly intertextual (and
least auteurist) of major critics:
I prefer to treat the movies as though they
have lives of their own; as though they are working together, talking and
referring to one another, reworking each others’ forms, styles, contents and
themes. That’s why I’ll always enjoy writing about
a group of movies rather than a single film. (13)
Experiments
in intertextual auteurism – based on generative comparisons between directors – are part of this
project. But even these mappings hold firm to a personal orientation. For
persons – individuals – will never be absent from auteurism. The lingering
problem with auteurism is not some residual Romanticism but the question mark
it raises about the – undoubtedly humanist – category of the individual. In
this sense, battles over auteurism may be an expression of a greater cultural
war, rarely named and hashed out as such: the contemporary struggle between
humanism and anti-humanism. Polan’s meditation arrives at a suspended
conclusion: “There is no need to study the film director but there is also no
need not to study the film director”. Why this ambivalence about the centring of
film analysis on individuals? Polan’s doubts are political: the study of
individuals may more easily lead us away from thinking about social,
intersubjective and collective processes than towards it (even though many
conceptual tools for the latter task are already available). Again, it is a
matter of circumnavigating critical blockage, wherever and however it looms.
But can we be so blasé, so fickle, about the call of the individual auteur and its siren-like effects upon us?
Cinema
studies as a field also has a problem with individualism or, more plainly, good
old individuality – by which I mean the individuality of critics or theorists,
the potential, powerful singularity of their personal visions and unique
voices. For film theory must also be, applying Deleuze’s terms, an act of
creation, an invention of a virtual cinema – and this invention can be radically different for each person who
writes and speaks. Think of it as a process of individuation (à la Gilbert Simondon) rather than
humanist individuality per se. The
surrealist credo of the “indestructible nature of the interior poetic voice”
(14) (so richly embodied by Petr Král and testified to in his tribute to
Tarkovsky) might help film theory, as a collective endeavour, to fully reclaim
and embrace its many so-called eccentrics (from Vachel Lindsay to Stanley Cavell via Pier Paolo Pasolini). This might also help it to reach beyond the
boundaries of the academy, since those critics and programmers who mostly toil
in journalistic fields can, of necessity, more easily and readily lay claim to
their voice, and to the auto-didactic sophistry of inventing cinema for their
readers or listeners – just look at the deserved cinephile cults around
cinémathèque/festival figures including Henri Langlois, Frieda Grafe, Peter von
Bagh and João Bénard da Costa.
The
individual, these days, marks an excess in the system – every kind of system,
political, intellectual, economic. This is how we need to understand the
“romantic” drive in auteurism: in the society of the anonymous bureaucrat, the
faceless factory worker, the unheralded clerk or administrator, it’s virtually
a miracle that, from the factory of
industrial filmmaking, there ever emerged (once upon a time) a name, a person,
an artist. Was that what Deleuze was alluding to when he invoked those “irreplaceable,
autonomous forms which these directors were able to invent and get screened, in spite of everything” (my emphasis)?
The
figure of the auteur symbolically speaks to that kind of widespread resistance
that is always in the filigree of the order of things. And the particular kind
of cultural economy that binds the individual who is an auteur to the
individual who is a filmgoer remains charged with a magical, primitive,
old-fashioned energy that is forever bound up with, but also forever outside,
the social contract: an economy of the gift,
which is also (at least potentially) an economy of excess and surplus. Every
cinephile knows this thrill: a film that strikes us a gift, a gift from
someone, somewhere, however tantalisingly clouded and mysterious in origin.
Auteurism
taps into the doubleness not only of desire but of art itself: art which is
simultaneously rooted in a specific place and time (as political materialism
teaches us) and gloriously detached from any place and time, floating in the
cultural ether until it reaches us (we hope) like a lightning bolt. Cinephilia
would not exist without this kind of revelatory experience: the mad but certain
thought that Sergei Parajanov (for example) speaks to me, that he might have made his films for me, even as I understand so little of what formed his life as a
specific historical subject; and then the compelling conviction that, thus
summoned, I must bear witness to this revelation, tell its story in the words or
gestures (in any medium) of the critical act. For the economy of the gift is
also an economy of (phantom) friendship, and of quasi-divine election.
The
best criticism, I believe, goes on to explore the otherness or alterity of the art-object in two directions at once:
it tracks mystery to its real-world source in history, nation and culture; but
also expands it to a virtual infinity. This is how we can encounter the auteur
as simultaneously a real artisan and a fantastic apparition.
* * *
I
am listening to a gift – the boxed CD set of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1999) – and
trying hard to follow its text, laid out as blank verse, in the accompanying
book. It is a mysterious, disorienting and somewhat spooky way to experience
this monumental, four-hour work, without the slightest indication of what is in
the image-track and the intertitles, or any identification of the various
actors and speakers. At the end of chapter 3 (b), “A New Wave”, a dialogue
takes place between Godard and a woman. I see a setting: the imaginary museum
constructed by Godard himself in his speculative and very personal cinema
history. The auteur – casting himself with typical self-lacerating irony as a
raving curator or maybe just a clownish janitor – fields a complaint from a
spectator:
we saw endless photos of works
but never of people
that’s what it was, the nouvelle vague
the auteurs’ policy
not auteurs, works
Godard
replies:
your friend is right, mademoiselle
the works first
then the men
Then
the sophistic dialogue takes a number of successive sharp turns, whereby this
distinction – between individuals and works – is quickly morphed into a duality
of heart (which the curator/filmmaker is accused of lacking) and labour.
you can film labour, mademoiselle
not hearts
But
– in the next conceptual twist – what if we live in “a time of unemployment”?
Now hands (performing the labour that produces works) are opposed to hearts in
Godard’s spiel. He turns the tables on his interlocutor: unemployment (worklessness)
means too many idle hands, but that’s not where the real challenge lies:
it’s a time of too many hands
and not enough hearts
yes, a heartless time
but not workless
when a period is sick
and doesn’t have work
for all the hands
it’s a new challenge
that confronts us
the challenge of working with our
hearts
and I know of no period
not yet
that didn’t have work for all the
hearts
Having
found herself back to her own initial affirmation of heart, the woman then
anchors the debate in an irrefutably personal reference.
all the same
Becker
Rossellini
Melville
Franju
Jacques Demy
Truffaut
you knew them all
And
Godard replies not merely for himself but also, in a sense, for all impassioned
auteurists:
yes, they were my friends (15)
1.
Marc Le Bot, “L’auteur anonyme ou l’état d’imposteur”, Hors cadre, no. 8 (1990), p. 11. My translation. back
2.
English version: Bernard Eisenschitz (trans. Tom Milne), Nicholas Ray: An American Journey (London: Faber and Faber, 1993). back
3.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Vincente Minnelli”, in Rick Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical (London: British Film
Institute, 1981), 10. Further references parenthesised in main text. back
4. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969). back
5. Quoted in Scott Eyman, “Sunrise in Bora Bora”, Film Comment (November-December 1990), p. 79. back
6. Charles W. Eckert, “Shall We Deport Levi-Strauss?”, Film Quarterly 27.3 (Spring 1974), p. 65. Further references parenthesised in main text. back
7. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, second edition (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), p. 173. back
8. William D. Routt, “Misprision”, Stephen Frears, “Alexander MacKendrick”, in John Boorman and Walter Donohoue (eds), Projections (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 68. back
9. Gilles Deleuze, “Vincennes Session of April 15, 1980, Leibniz Seminar”, Discourse Vol 20 No 3 (Fall 1998), p. 79; “Vincennes Session of April 22, 1980”, presently off-line (September 2020); Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. xiv. back
10. See, for a range of examples, Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); Dugald Williamson, Authorship and Criticism (Sydney: Local Consumption, 1986); and Hors cadre, no. 8 (1990), devoted to “the state of the auteur”. back
11.
Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang:
Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000). back
12. William D. Routt, “Pieces”, Screening the Past, no. 10 (July 2000). back
13. Philip Brophy, Restuff: Horror, Gore, Exploitation (Melbourne: Stuff Publications,
1988), p. 3. back
14.
Jean Schuster interviewed by Paul Hammond, “Specialists in Revolt”, New Statesman 2958 (4 December 1987), p.
23. back
15. Jean Luc-Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma (Germany: ECM, 1999), pp. 69-70. back
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