Studies in Film Authorship

21/09/2026

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How can cinema have authors when a film would appear to be authored into existence by so many people? We have directors, yes, but also writers, cameramen, actors, production designers, musicians and editors. When a writer authors a book, they rely a little on an editor and a production designer to produce the cover and typeface. But when they describe a scene, they don’t have a set designer moving objects around, an actor they have hired moving through the drama they are describing, and a cameraman filming it. These would all seem to be elements that would water down any notion that one person is responsible for the work produced.

Yet in the 1950s, a group of French critics, who would go on to become directors themselves, reckoned that film authorship was a thing, and it became known as politique des auteurs. It was the sort of notion that lead a Cahiers critic, Charles Bitsch, interviewing Nicholas Ray, to open his questions by saying, “there is an underlying theme which can be seen in all your films: that evil exists in every human being.” (Cahiers du Cinema: the 1950s) It could lead Francois Truffaut to say of Ray’s Bigger than Life that if it “throws some people off, it’s because Ray’s films resemble each other too much for the newest one to display its meaning immediately. But isn’t it the critic’s duty to serve as an intermediary between the authors of such a film and the audience it is aimed at?” (The Films in my Life) Truffaut makes clear that the critic has a specific role: to bring out the originality of a director’s vision, and to do so across a range of films. What matters isn’t how good a film is, but how great a filmmaker’s sensibility happens to be. This sensibility will become all the more evident the more films they make, and the more films the viewer sees. Someone who goes off to see Bigger than Life without the Ray context might view an exaggerated, melodramatic account of a man who takes a drug where he might die without it. The drug changes his personality, and all the more so when he abuses the corticosteroid. The film didn’t do well when it was released, but steadily its reputation has increased, and Truffaut seemed to have a point. The more the film could be viewed within the context of Ray’s body of work, and the more critics championed and explained his vision, the higher its reputation.

Authorship needn’t be the only way to look at films. But it has yielded rich results, offering immensely useful insights into various directors. It has been as solid a mode of evaluation as any, and is still worth our attention, no matter the various attacks upon it, both from structuralists and cognitivists. Structuralists believed that the idea of an author was a construct, at best a play of forces rather than an individual with a vision. To paraphrase a well-known structuralist maxim: film makes filmmakers; filmmakers don’t make films. In other words, there are, in place, various codes and, out of them, films are made, and the makers of these films are very much secondary to those codes. “In the broadest sense, Structuralism is a way of perceiving the human world in terms of structures.” (Continental Philosophy) In cognitivism, the individual director and their vision is less important than vision from a scientific, perceptual perspective, as the film offers general cues we read more than directorial singularities we notice. As David Bordwell says, “A norm isn’t a law or even a rule; it’s, as they say in Pirates of the Caribbean, more of a guideline. But it’s a pretty strong guideline. Norms exert pressure on filmmakers, and they steer viewers in specific directions.” (Observations in Film Art)

To understand aspects of authorship, we can take three auteurs and look at two of their films, while referencing various others. If Truffaut reckoned a Nicholas Ray film in isolation can be hard to assimilate without a wider context, multiply this at least tenfold for Lars von Trier. While many films are entertainment, others are confections, and some are tracts, von Trier makes provocations. His work asks awkward questions over narratively elaborated answers, and one can exit a film by the Danish director offended, bewildered and moved simultaneously. In Breaking the Waves, he sets his film on the Isle of Skye, with his central character somewhere between the village idiot and a holy fool, someone who prays to God with the naivety of a person making Santa requests, and with the determination of a woman who knows what loyalty and love are better than anybody else in the community. In a religious place which might talk a lot about self-sacrifice,

Bess is equal to the task. She marries an oil rig worker, misses him when he goes away, and asks the lord if Jan can return and stay with her. Indeed, he does, but only because of an accident on the oil platform that leaves him paralysed. What is a good woman to do after such a tragedy? She decides that she will debase herself by sleeping with anybody who will have her, and gets into situations so dangerous she ends up dead. That is a heck of a spoiler, but it is hard to say much about Breaking the Waves without acknowledging this act of belief, and that Jan will return to health as a consequence of her actions. Any confusion the viewer possesses in the early stage of the film will be weak next to the disorientation at the conclusion. What is von Trier trying to say? Added to the narrative enigmas he generates, the Danish mischief-maker also creates a twofold form. Firstly, the film is mainly shot with handheld cameras, and secondly, it is interspersed with chapters (a device von Trier would later use in Dogville and Manderlay). The chapters are distinct in style from the rest of the film. They are images of postcard Scotland, with little movement in them, except a car passing along a distant narrow road, or the waves lapping on the shore. Each chapter uses a song that appears to comment on the next stage of the drama: songs by Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Deep Purple, Procul Harum and others.

It is as if von Trier wants a thematic equivalent of the trombone shot: to draw us in and push us out simultaneously. He tells a story that is close to hospital melodrama as Jan lies in bed unable to move, and Bess wonders what she can do to alleviate his suffering. It is a story worthy of his fellow Dane Soren Kierkegaard, and the notion of what God wants from us. At the same time, von Trier films it in an immediate way, only to interrupt that immediacy with the chapter headings, ones that risk taking us out of the diegesis. When Truffaut insists that to understand Bigger than Life we need to understand Ray and his oeuvre, this is much more evidently the case with von Trier. Irrationality is central to his work, so one needs to find the rationale within it. As he says, “Rationality is something I think is based in anxiety. If you’re afraid of chaos, if you’re afraid of living life, with all its conflicts and contradictions, then you grasp rationality as a defence.” (Trier on Von Trier)  In this sense, Bess is fearless: she doesn’t use logic as a basis for safety, and von Trier proposes that whatever personal tragedy ensues, she ends up confirmed in her belief. Some might insist von Trier has made a film about a woman who sacrifices herself for her man but, if this is so, it takes on such an exaggerated form that we need to think more about the notion of sacrifice than the idea of anti-feminism. Many may understandably fret over Bess as yet another woman who will do anything for her bloke, but the emphasis is on anything. The conservative notion of self-sacrifice is unlikely to include one’s wife giving a stranger a hand-job on the back of a bus. Von Trier is interested in the extremity of sacrifice closer to the biblical Abraham and Isaac, over the prosaic demands of cooking, cleaning and knowing one’s place. If Ray accessed 50s melodrama to offer a deliberately overblown account of a dominant man in the house, von Trier ups the melodramatic ante and asks us to muse over what sacrifice means.

Von Trier provokes again in a very different way in The Idiots, and to explain why, we need to offer a spoiler once again. It isn’t until the end of the film that we discover Karen lost her baby, and finds herself oddly at home in a commune where everyone pretends to have learning difficulties. Ostensibly, von Trier seems to side with central figure Stoffer, who reckons such actions allow people to counter bourgeois expectation and rationality. But while we might find ourselves seeing through this man’s bad faith, and those of others who can only ‘spass’ amongst strangers, but not in work situations or with family, at the end of the film Karen returns to her folk, along with a friend from the commune, and ‘spasses’ in front of them. She has the integrity that none of the others quite have, but it comes from a disintegration that stemmed from the loss of her child. Her husband and others find her actions both inexplicable and inexcusable, and yet the film has shown the rationale behind the irrationality, just as he did with Bess’s behaviour in Breaking the Waves. We may find Bess and Karen’s actions absurd, but von Trier has shown that we needn’t be as confused as Karen’s family or the Skye community. He has offered a vision that finds, in the characters for whom he has much feeling, a logic that couldn’t otherwise be easily understood.

While in Breaking the Waves, the director offers chapter interludes, in The Idiots it takes the form of direct-to-camera interviews with the other members of the commune after it has broken up, all discussing Karen. Why was she there, why did she stay? Von Trier proposes that community is important, but what type of community? In Breaking the Waves, the religious one Bess has been brought up in expects a conformity she cannot meet, and in The Idiots, a family that she cannot face, except through the ‘idiotic’, through recognising her pain in the odd behaviour she must adopt. In Dogville and Manderlay, again provocative questions of community arise, with Dogville asking, should somebody be used as a function within the community, and turned into a scapegoat, or welcomed as a guest, and treated accordingly? In the latter, the guest helps; in the former, the guest is obliged. Dogville examines how Grace starts as a welcome guest and ends as a hounded outsider. In Manderlay, what does it mean to be a slave within a community, and is a slave community a paradoxical term?

Without saying anything more about von Trier’s work, we can see both how provocative it is and how understanding his vision might demand reading interviews with the director, reading critical appraisals, and watching several films. These are all central to any notion of authorship.

Claire Denis’s films can sometimes be as unfathomable as von Trier’s (The Intruder; Trouble Every Day; The Bastards). But there is a sensual dimension to her work, one that allows us to experience the film without necessarily understanding it. She captures well the texture of things, as though taking that early moment in Hiroshima mon amour where bodies commingle, and making it the basis of her work. Whether it is the foreign legionnaires dancing with the local Djibouti Women in Beau Travail, the men in training in the same film, the central character aimless during a night of traffic jams in Vendredi Soir, or a moment where characters dance at a bar in 35 Shots of Rum. “How to share with an audience something that’s an intuition, a fragment?” Denis says, adding, “I think sensuality is the key. Cinema cannot exist except through eroticism. The position of the spectator is like a kind of amorous passivity and hence is highly erotic.” (Sight and Sound) While the viewer may sometimes be confused, they will also be on some level aroused, and the cold plot logic of many a film is replaced by a warm sensual cinematic tactility. Whether it happens to be characters brushing up against each other, or the camera brushing up against the characters, Denis often works with close up and the darkness of the night, with Vendredi Soir, Trouble Every Day and Bastards all nocturnal films.

To understand her work, style, and preoccupations, we can look at a scene from Beau Travail and another from 35 Shots of Rum. To speak of the former, we will once again have to give away the ending. Here we have a man thrown out of the Foreign Legion for maltreating a soldier under his command. He has been wandering around Marseille for a while, looking aimless and nostalgic. Then we see him make his bed, lie down on it and take out a gun. Will Galoup (Denis Lavant) kill himself? We don’t know. What we do know is that Denis will close her film with a dance that makes us wonder whether the rhythm of the man’s life will come to an end, as he may well be recalling an earlier scene in the story. Or is he generating a reverie, or is this Denis offering it as a moment that takes place beyond the man’s life as the sequence becomes part of the closing credits? Erika Balsam says, “In a film that consistently muddles chronological time and confuses the distinction between mental pictures and real events, it is impossible to assign a clear ‘what’ or ‘when’ to these unexpected images. They are out of time, after the end. Is Galoup dead or alive? Denis mocks such certainty.” (Frieze) The rhythm of his life is there, in the twitching vein in his arm, before the film cuts to the dancefloor. It is there in how he moves when his dance incorporates the most fluid of choreographed movements, and the jerkiest of bodily states, and it is there too in the choice of song: Corona’s The Rhythm of the Night. It sums up well the film’s examination of bodily states as war machines or love machines, of destructive or seductive forces. Lavant’s brilliantly ambivalent movements suggest both, but so does Denis’s work more generally. “There must be violence,” she says, “for there to be desire” (Sight and Sound).

The nature of this emphasis depends on the film: in Trouble Every Day, violence is most pronounced as desire turns people cannibalistic, while in 35 Shots of Rum it is at its most gentle. This can be best described by the influence of the horror film on Trouble Every Day, and the benign underlying presence of Yasujiro Ozu in the latter. Discovering Ozu films, she “was flabbergasted by the father figure in so many of them, usually played by Chishu Ryu. He was familial, yet secretive, hiding all his suffering. I’d never seen films where what happens inside a family is offered so delicately.” (BFI) We can see this gentle tone in a dance sequence quite different from Beau Travail’s. A vital notion in several Ozu films is how a father copes with his daughter leaving home (Late Spring and an Autumn Afternoon especially, and both of course with Ryu). Denis offers her own version of it and exemplifies the moment in a scene consistent with her sensual aesthetic, using once again music to convey feelings that perhaps can’t be expressed in purely verbal form. In the scene, daughter Josephine dances with her father Lionel (Alex Decas) when a young man, Noe, steps in as the new song starts: Nightshift by The Commodores. As Lionel steps aside and leaves the frame, we see a smile cross his face as he looks offscreen, presumably at the woman he himself had been dancing with a couple of minutes before. The film holds for a while on the shot he has exited, before cutting back to Lionel, seated at the bar and looking pensive. Denis cuts back to Josephine and Noe as the dance carries a strong erotic charge, and back again to Lionel, who looks now potentially worried. Is it that his daughter is showing signs of desire in front of her father, that Noe doesn’t quite look like the man a father would want his daughter to fall in love with, or is the bond between father and daughter such that he knows that the absence of that closeness will leave him bereft? In Ozu’s work, the emotions are complex, and the intricacies of feeling are very carefully delineated, but any eroticism is usually well-contained. In 35 Shots of Rum, Denis acknowledges the force of sexual feeling between Noe and Josephine, and the discomfort this might cause a father, no matter if Lionel is himself working through his own desires over former lover Gabrielle.

When Denis spoke of adapting Emmanuele Bernheim’s Vendredi Soir, she said,  “When people read the book, they all said: ‘Ah, for once there’s going to be dialogue!’ But in fact, it’s often internal dialogue. There isn’t much spoken out loud in the film, even though we retained nearly all the dialogue from the book. There are perhaps one or two bits of dialogue which we suppressed during the filming, because the actors did not want to deliver them...” (Senses of Cinema)  Interviewer Aime Ancian adds that, “You have said that you consider dialogue akin to noise…” and, while Denis insists she isn’t so theoretical as to make blanket statements, she wouldn’t quite disagree either. She finds in music, touch, rhythm, dance, violence and sex a language that demands few words, an approach that manages to create ambiguity without quite generating confusion. Yet what Truffaut says about Ray might be as useful when trying to understand both Denis’ and von Trier’s ouevre. They are working something through, rather than producing a work which fits neatly into patterns of narrative and stylistic conformity.

It should nevertheless be noted that when Truffaut made his remarks about Ray, there were other auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford who weren’t creating interpretive problems for viewers. Sure, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Ford’s The Searchers defied viewer expectations, as the former ends tragically, and the latter cannot quite incorporate its hero into the future of the homestead. But most of the directors’ films could be watched easily by a viewer with no feeling that they need to view more films by either filmmaker to better understand the film they had just seen. Cahiers critics might have perceived all sorts of specific qualities in a given director’s work, but viewers would have watched a solidly executed piece of quality entertainment.  Jacques Rivette could say of Otto Preminger, “Preminger believes first in mise en scene, the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space” (Cahiers du Cinema: the 1950s). But the average punter didn’t need to know that to have a good time watching The Moon is Blue, Anatomy of a Murder and Bonjour Tristesse.  Von Trier, hugely, and Denis, to a lesser degree, demand a broader context to be comprehended, and that context is centrally their other films.

Where does this leave our third and final auteur, Martin Scorsese? Writing on Scorsese’s early feature Mean Streets, Pauline Kael reckoned it “is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking.” (Reeling) Yet this is personal in a different way from von Trier or Denis. Scorsese is drawing on his milieu in Little Italy, and the director would go on in other films to offer violent visions of New York: in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas. But though Taxi Driver has camera shots and cuts that break with convention, and an ambiguous, puzzling conclusion, most of the director’s work can be deemed personal without quite demanding we see a few Scorsese films to comprehend his sensibility. Like many a great filmmaker, Scorsese’s work benefits from viewing a handful of them, seeing how his themes of personal identity, male insecurity, troublesome conviviality, and explosive alienation align with a style usually capable of keeping a viewer on edge. But it doesn’t necessitate it.

Yet it is always useful in understanding a director’s work, however obscure their preoccupations or expected their themes, to choose a detail that shows up in several films. Whether it is Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or After Hours, mirrors are often prominent in Scorsese’s work, creating a self-reflective space for his interest in characterisation over narrative. When Bickle looks in the mirror in Taxi Driver and asks ‘are you talkin’ to me?’, or La Motta prepares for a show at the end of Raging Bull, where he recites lines from various great writers by talking to himself in the mirror, it is consistent with the voice-overs in Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street and even The Age of Innocence, where it is much more detached. It gives to the director’s films a reflective immediacy, a paradoxical term that nevertheless captures an aspect of Scorsese’s ability to generate dramatic force within the context of characters who might not always like what they have become or have failed to become. In Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, the characters are failures, while in Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull and The Wolf of Wall Street, they have become successful. But, usually, this success reveals a greater failure as they betray friends, wives, their families or values, if they ever had them. The mirror and the voiceover are two ways Scorsese creates a characterisational schism and allows him to explore the minds of his characters more vividly than many American directors confined by the story’s demands. In Scorsese’s best work, the narrative is only half the story. Bickle will aim to kill a politician, and instead goes on to slay some pimps. La Motta will become world middleweight champion, but fails in winning the fight to control his appetites and his paranoia, and ends up overweight and alone. Even in a black screwball comedy like After Hours, Paul Hackett doesn’t get the girl he went out into the night to seduce, but instead finds himself harassed and humiliated by various figures he encounters on his very long, very funny, dark night of a mediocre soul.

Yet to understand more broadly Scorsese’s work, we can concentrate on two of these famous scenes: the monologue in the mirror in Taxi Driver, and the rehearsal at the end of Raging Bull. In the former, Travis Bickle is alone in his room, and yet far from alone in his head. As he stands in front of the mirror, he creates a scenario where he gets into an altercation. And so he says, “You talkin’ to me”, in this now-famous line, and adds, “while I’m the only one here” after he turns around to see if anyone is behind him. Though we have noted it is a monologue in the mirror, this is both true and not true. At the beginning of the scene, we do see it before Scorsese whip pans from Bickle’s reflection to Bickle himself, and then after the film cuts, he may diegetically be looking in the mirror, but De Niro is actually looking at the camera. Scorsese could have held the shot with Bickle looking into the glass, and Scorsese’s camera off at an angle as it incorporates both Travis and the mirror in the shot. But part of the scene’s force is that it becomes a confrontation both between Bickle and his imaginary foe in the glass, and the viewer who is being confronted by Travis. Strictly speaking, this may not be breaking the fourth wall (as Godard often does, Woody Allen offers in Annie Hall, and that Scorsese shows on several occasions in The Wolf of Wall Street), but it can create an uncanny version of it. Bickle looks at the mirror, but De Niro also looks at us. It adds to the feeling that the character is so desperate and alienated that he will find anybody to engage with, and this is not only the person he conjures up in his head as he looks for a confrontation. It is also with the viewer who is uncomfortably placed in a story that constantly pushes its own formal boundaries. It is there in that whip pan (rather than a shot-counter-shot), just as it is there in other moments in the film: the 360-degree shot in the garage, a lap dissolve without any time lapse, an arbitrary camera movement in a corridor, overhead insert shots. It is evident too in a slow-motion repeated shot as Bickle turns towards the mirror/audience in the scene.

Most of these formal choices feel exactly that: choices the director makes, rather than conventions the filmmaker adopts. Take the lap dissolve, for example. Usually when a filmmaker adopts it, the film illustrates a temporal transition. Here, Scorsese shows Bickle walking along the street, dissolves, and shows him still walking along the same road. Overhead inserts are usually offered to convey important information or to show a scene of strong violence in detail. It might be a close-up of a letter a loved one has sent, or a person getting a bullet in the knee. When Scorsese uses it to show Bickle getting handed a document, or spreading his hands over a table, it gives us no significant detail that justifies the insert. Such shots give to the film an arbitrary quality that isn’t the same thing as saying such moments are pointless. We could claim they are formally pointful – as if most shots in cinema are so integrated into the telling they have no purpose but to make the story visible, by making the form invisible. Scorsese may not be as radical as Godard or Resnais, and may have never again been quite as formally audacious as he is here. But he insists that the story he tells doesn’t have a given form; it has a chosen one.

This is one of the defining features of authorship alongside a particular problematic that the filmmaker explores. Yet this doesn’t mean that those who aren’t formally fresh automatically fail to be viewed as auteurs. This is one of the tricky aspects of Cahiers’ notion of authorship, one that can seem unclear for two reasons. Firstly, that it requires often very subtle analysis on the critic’s part. If many a viewer can see a large difference between a Preminger film like Anatomy of a Murder and Taxi Driver, a John Ford film as opposed to a Godard, how many can distinguish between a Howard Hawks film and a Ford? What is the difference between Hawks’ Red River and Rio Bravo, and Ford’s approach to the western in Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine? Many will just see a good western and view Hawks and Ford as both mastering the genre, and the formal properties required to manifest it. It will take very precise criticism to distinguish Hawks from Ford beyond the obvious. The obvious would be that Hawks’ range was much broader than Ford's, as he directed westerns, noirs, musicals, gangster films and screwballs. Ford is chiefly known for his westerns and war films. A good auteur critic would see in the breadth of Hawks’ work a consistency that would be much easier to find in Ford. Jacques Rivette describes it thus: “Hawks’ oeuvre is equally divided between comedies and dramas – a remarkable ambivalence. More remarkable still is his frequent fusing of the two elements so that each, rather than damaging the other, seems to underscore their reciprocal relation.” (Cahiers du Cinema: the 1950s). As Ford’s work lacks this ambivalence, his films will subsequently be quite different from Hawks’, and might help explain a sentimentality in Ford, while in Hawks we have “a harsh feeling of an existence in which no action can undo itself from the web of responsibility.” Rivette adds, “could we be offered a more bitter view of life than this?” Looking at classic Hollywood, we might see many similarities; Cahiers proposed we look at the authorship of small difference.

In this sense, Scorsese could more easily distinguish himself from his peers than Ford could from his contemporaries. Scorsese films don’t seem similar to those of Coppola, Spielberg, Altman, Ashby and Penn. Since the studio system had collapsed in the early 1960s, there was more room to innovate, and far more opportunities to be influenced by innovations elsewhere, as New Hollywood absorbed the new film movements in France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the UK. Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies stated, “Martin Scorsese himself counts Polish cinema as one of the major influences on his film style, alongside Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave.” Though there are many distinct uses of form in Raging Bull, and never more so than in the editing of the fight sequences, as it utilises different frame speeds and hard cuts to take us into the pain of the sport more readily than its glory, Scorsese opts for no cutting at all in Raging Bull’s closing scene. It is as though all the adrenaline of the boxing matches that emphasised the beatings has led to the closing moments where La Motta looks thoroughly defeated. His nose is large and shapeless, his body heavy and cumbersome, and the speech he will give, from Budd Schulberg, reflects his own life, even if it shouldn’t. After all, while in On the Waterfront Terry throws a fight that ends his career, La Motta might throw a fight too, as the film shows, but he goes on to become middleweight champion of the world. However, the difference between Terry and Jake is that Terry finds himself caught in circumstances he can’t avoid; Jake has spent years in a psyche he can’t escape.

The single-take scene captures the sluggishness of a man who was formerly known for his speed and movement, and while we should never reduce form to simple equations, the advantage New Hollywood filmmakers have over their classic Hollywood predecessors is that they have more freedom in making the form work for them on their own terms. The new waves of the 1960s freed filmmakers up to use faster cuts or longer takes, to break the fourth wall, or offer voice-over in more personal, diaristic ways, over pushing the story along. Scorsese’s work is thus indebted to the Europeans, but they also gave him a voice he could call his own, making it easier to distinguish his oeuvre from others of his generation than it would be to differentiate most classic filmmakers from each other. One could argue it made authorship easier to practice, and perhaps aptly so. The Cahiers critics saw distinctiveness where others had seen homogenisation, viewing classic Hollywood cinema not only as a mass-produced medium, but also as an art form that allowed individuals to offer creative work. In turn, these critics used this theoretical assumption to become auteurs themselves, and this too led to others in the 1960s to do likewise, and the New Hollywood filmmakers a decade later to insist on the same freedom. Whether the auteur theory is a strong one logically (aren’t there far too many voices involved in a film to claim authorship?), it became undeniably influential. It still hasn’t gone away, even if we have looked at filmmakers all now in their 70s and 80s to suggest how directors use the art form to produce a singular vision.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in Film Authorship

How can cinema have authors when a film would appear to be authored into existence by so many people? We have directors, yes, but also writers, cameramen, actors, production designers, musicians and editors. When a writer authors a book, they rely a little on an editor and a production designer to produce the cover and typeface. But when they describe a scene, they don’t have a set designer moving objects around, an actor they have hired moving through the drama they are describing, and a cameraman filming it. These would all seem to be elements that would water down any notion that one person is responsible for the work produced.

Yet in the 1950s, a group of French critics, who would go on to become directors themselves, reckoned that film authorship was a thing, and it became known as politique des auteurs. It was the sort of notion that lead a Cahiers critic, Charles Bitsch, interviewing Nicholas Ray, to open his questions by saying, “there is an underlying theme which can be seen in all your films: that evil exists in every human being.” (Cahiers du Cinema: the 1950s) It could lead Francois Truffaut to say of Ray’s Bigger than Life that if it “throws some people off, it’s because Ray’s films resemble each other too much for the newest one to display its meaning immediately. But isn’t it the critic’s duty to serve as an intermediary between the authors of such a film and the audience it is aimed at?” (The Films in my Life) Truffaut makes clear that the critic has a specific role: to bring out the originality of a director’s vision, and to do so across a range of films. What matters isn’t how good a film is, but how great a filmmaker’s sensibility happens to be. This sensibility will become all the more evident the more films they make, and the more films the viewer sees. Someone who goes off to see Bigger than Life without the Ray context might view an exaggerated, melodramatic account of a man who takes a drug where he might die without it. The drug changes his personality, and all the more so when he abuses the corticosteroid. The film didn’t do well when it was released, but steadily its reputation has increased, and Truffaut seemed to have a point. The more the film could be viewed within the context of Ray’s body of work, and the more critics championed and explained his vision, the higher its reputation.

Authorship needn’t be the only way to look at films. But it has yielded rich results, offering immensely useful insights into various directors. It has been as solid a mode of evaluation as any, and is still worth our attention, no matter the various attacks upon it, both from structuralists and cognitivists. Structuralists believed that the idea of an author was a construct, at best a play of forces rather than an individual with a vision. To paraphrase a well-known structuralist maxim: film makes filmmakers; filmmakers don’t make films. In other words, there are, in place, various codes and, out of them, films are made, and the makers of these films are very much secondary to those codes. “In the broadest sense, Structuralism is a way of perceiving the human world in terms of structures.” (Continental Philosophy) In cognitivism, the individual director and their vision is less important than vision from a scientific, perceptual perspective, as the film offers general cues we read more than directorial singularities we notice. As David Bordwell says, “A norm isn’t a law or even a rule; it’s, as they say in Pirates of the Caribbean, more of a guideline. But it’s a pretty strong guideline. Norms exert pressure on filmmakers, and they steer viewers in specific directions.” (Observations in Film Art)

To understand aspects of authorship, we can take three auteurs and look at two of their films, while referencing various others. If Truffaut reckoned a Nicholas Ray film in isolation can be hard to assimilate without a wider context, multiply this at least tenfold for Lars von Trier. While many films are entertainment, others are confections, and some are tracts, von Trier makes provocations. His work asks awkward questions over narratively elaborated answers, and one can exit a film by the Danish director offended, bewildered and moved simultaneously. In Breaking the Waves, he sets his film on the Isle of Skye, with his central character somewhere between the village idiot and a holy fool, someone who prays to God with the naivety of a person making Santa requests, and with the determination of a woman who knows what loyalty and love are better than anybody else in the community. In a religious place which might talk a lot about self-sacrifice,

Bess is equal to the task. She marries an oil rig worker, misses him when he goes away, and asks the lord if Jan can return and stay with her. Indeed, he does, but only because of an accident on the oil platform that leaves him paralysed. What is a good woman to do after such a tragedy? She decides that she will debase herself by sleeping with anybody who will have her, and gets into situations so dangerous she ends up dead. That is a heck of a spoiler, but it is hard to say much about Breaking the Waves without acknowledging this act of belief, and that Jan will return to health as a consequence of her actions. Any confusion the viewer possesses in the early stage of the film will be weak next to the disorientation at the conclusion. What is von Trier trying to say? Added to the narrative enigmas he generates, the Danish mischief-maker also creates a twofold form. Firstly, the film is mainly shot with handheld cameras, and secondly, it is interspersed with chapters (a device von Trier would later use in Dogville and Manderlay). The chapters are distinct in style from the rest of the film. They are images of postcard Scotland, with little movement in them, except a car passing along a distant narrow road, or the waves lapping on the shore. Each chapter uses a song that appears to comment on the next stage of the drama: songs by Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Deep Purple, Procul Harum and others.

It is as if von Trier wants a thematic equivalent of the trombone shot: to draw us in and push us out simultaneously. He tells a story that is close to hospital melodrama as Jan lies in bed unable to move, and Bess wonders what she can do to alleviate his suffering. It is a story worthy of his fellow Dane Soren Kierkegaard, and the notion of what God wants from us. At the same time, von Trier films it in an immediate way, only to interrupt that immediacy with the chapter headings, ones that risk taking us out of the diegesis. When Truffaut insists that to understand Bigger than Life we need to understand Ray and his oeuvre, this is much more evidently the case with von Trier. Irrationality is central to his work, so one needs to find the rationale within it. As he says, “Rationality is something I think is based in anxiety. If you’re afraid of chaos, if you’re afraid of living life, with all its conflicts and contradictions, then you grasp rationality as a defence.” (Trier on Von Trier)  In this sense, Bess is fearless: she doesn’t use logic as a basis for safety, and von Trier proposes that whatever personal tragedy ensues, she ends up confirmed in her belief. Some might insist von Trier has made a film about a woman who sacrifices herself for her man but, if this is so, it takes on such an exaggerated form that we need to think more about the notion of sacrifice than the idea of anti-feminism. Many may understandably fret over Bess as yet another woman who will do anything for her bloke, but the emphasis is on anything. The conservative notion of self-sacrifice is unlikely to include one’s wife giving a stranger a hand-job on the back of a bus. Von Trier is interested in the extremity of sacrifice closer to the biblical Abraham and Isaac, over the prosaic demands of cooking, cleaning and knowing one’s place. If Ray accessed 50s melodrama to offer a deliberately overblown account of a dominant man in the house, von Trier ups the melodramatic ante and asks us to muse over what sacrifice means.

Von Trier provokes again in a very different way in The Idiots, and to explain why, we need to offer a spoiler once again. It isn’t until the end of the film that we discover Karen lost her baby, and finds herself oddly at home in a commune where everyone pretends to have learning difficulties. Ostensibly, von Trier seems to side with central figure Stoffer, who reckons such actions allow people to counter bourgeois expectation and rationality. But while we might find ourselves seeing through this man’s bad faith, and those of others who can only ‘spass’ amongst strangers, but not in work situations or with family, at the end of the film Karen returns to her folk, along with a friend from the commune, and ‘spasses’ in front of them. She has the integrity that none of the others quite have, but it comes from a disintegration that stemmed from the loss of her child. Her husband and others find her actions both inexplicable and inexcusable, and yet the film has shown the rationale behind the irrationality, just as he did with Bess’s behaviour in Breaking the Waves. We may find Bess and Karen’s actions absurd, but von Trier has shown that we needn’t be as confused as Karen’s family or the Skye community. He has offered a vision that finds, in the characters for whom he has much feeling, a logic that couldn’t otherwise be easily understood.

While in Breaking the Waves, the director offers chapter interludes, in The Idiots it takes the form of direct-to-camera interviews with the other members of the commune after it has broken up, all discussing Karen. Why was she there, why did she stay? Von Trier proposes that community is important, but what type of community? In Breaking the Waves, the religious one Bess has been brought up in expects a conformity she cannot meet, and in The Idiots, a family that she cannot face, except through the ‘idiotic’, through recognising her pain in the odd behaviour she must adopt. In Dogville and Manderlay, again provocative questions of community arise, with Dogville asking, should somebody be used as a function within the community, and turned into a scapegoat, or welcomed as a guest, and treated accordingly? In the latter, the guest helps; in the former, the guest is obliged. Dogville examines how Grace starts as a welcome guest and ends as a hounded outsider. In Manderlay, what does it mean to be a slave within a community, and is a slave community a paradoxical term?

Without saying anything more about von Trier’s work, we can see both how provocative it is and how understanding his vision might demand reading interviews with the director, reading critical appraisals, and watching several films. These are all central to any notion of authorship.

Claire Denis’s films can sometimes be as unfathomable as von Trier’s (The Intruder; Trouble Every Day; The Bastards). But there is a sensual dimension to her work, one that allows us to experience the film without necessarily understanding it. She captures well the texture of things, as though taking that early moment in Hiroshima mon amour where bodies commingle, and making it the basis of her work. Whether it is the foreign legionnaires dancing with the local Djibouti Women in Beau Travail, the men in training in the same film, the central character aimless during a night of traffic jams in Vendredi Soir, or a moment where characters dance at a bar in 35 Shots of Rum. “How to share with an audience something that’s an intuition, a fragment?” Denis says, adding, “I think sensuality is the key. Cinema cannot exist except through eroticism. The position of the spectator is like a kind of amorous passivity and hence is highly erotic.” (Sight and Sound) While the viewer may sometimes be confused, they will also be on some level aroused, and the cold plot logic of many a film is replaced by a warm sensual cinematic tactility. Whether it happens to be characters brushing up against each other, or the camera brushing up against the characters, Denis often works with close up and the darkness of the night, with Vendredi Soir, Trouble Every Day and Bastards all nocturnal films.

To understand her work, style, and preoccupations, we can look at a scene from Beau Travail and another from 35 Shots of Rum. To speak of the former, we will once again have to give away the ending. Here we have a man thrown out of the Foreign Legion for maltreating a soldier under his command. He has been wandering around Marseille for a while, looking aimless and nostalgic. Then we see him make his bed, lie down on it and take out a gun. Will Galoup (Denis Lavant) kill himself? We don’t know. What we do know is that Denis will close her film with a dance that makes us wonder whether the rhythm of the man’s life will come to an end, as he may well be recalling an earlier scene in the story. Or is he generating a reverie, or is this Denis offering it as a moment that takes place beyond the man’s life as the sequence becomes part of the closing credits? Erika Balsam says, “In a film that consistently muddles chronological time and confuses the distinction between mental pictures and real events, it is impossible to assign a clear ‘what’ or ‘when’ to these unexpected images. They are out of time, after the end. Is Galoup dead or alive? Denis mocks such certainty.” (Frieze) The rhythm of his life is there, in the twitching vein in his arm, before the film cuts to the dancefloor. It is there in how he moves when his dance incorporates the most fluid of choreographed movements, and the jerkiest of bodily states, and it is there too in the choice of song: Corona’s The Rhythm of the Night. It sums up well the film’s examination of bodily states as war machines or love machines, of destructive or seductive forces. Lavant’s brilliantly ambivalent movements suggest both, but so does Denis’s work more generally. “There must be violence,” she says, “for there to be desire” (Sight and Sound).

The nature of this emphasis depends on the film: in Trouble Every Day, violence is most pronounced as desire turns people cannibalistic, while in 35 Shots of Rum it is at its most gentle. This can be best described by the influence of the horror film on Trouble Every Day, and the benign underlying presence of Yasujiro Ozu in the latter. Discovering Ozu films, she “was flabbergasted by the father figure in so many of them, usually played by Chishu Ryu. He was familial, yet secretive, hiding all his suffering. I’d never seen films where what happens inside a family is offered so delicately.” (BFI) We can see this gentle tone in a dance sequence quite different from Beau Travail’s. A vital notion in several Ozu films is how a father copes with his daughter leaving home (Late Spring and an Autumn Afternoon especially, and both of course with Ryu). Denis offers her own version of it and exemplifies the moment in a scene consistent with her sensual aesthetic, using once again music to convey feelings that perhaps can’t be expressed in purely verbal form. In the scene, daughter Josephine dances with her father Lionel (Alex Decas) when a young man, Noe, steps in as the new song starts: Nightshift by The Commodores. As Lionel steps aside and leaves the frame, we see a smile cross his face as he looks offscreen, presumably at the woman he himself had been dancing with a couple of minutes before. The film holds for a while on the shot he has exited, before cutting back to Lionel, seated at the bar and looking pensive. Denis cuts back to Josephine and Noe as the dance carries a strong erotic charge, and back again to Lionel, who looks now potentially worried. Is it that his daughter is showing signs of desire in front of her father, that Noe doesn’t quite look like the man a father would want his daughter to fall in love with, or is the bond between father and daughter such that he knows that the absence of that closeness will leave him bereft? In Ozu’s work, the emotions are complex, and the intricacies of feeling are very carefully delineated, but any eroticism is usually well-contained. In 35 Shots of Rum, Denis acknowledges the force of sexual feeling between Noe and Josephine, and the discomfort this might cause a father, no matter if Lionel is himself working through his own desires over former lover Gabrielle.

When Denis spoke of adapting Emmanuele Bernheim’s Vendredi Soir, she said,  “When people read the book, they all said: ‘Ah, for once there’s going to be dialogue!’ But in fact, it’s often internal dialogue. There isn’t much spoken out loud in the film, even though we retained nearly all the dialogue from the book. There are perhaps one or two bits of dialogue which we suppressed during the filming, because the actors did not want to deliver them...” (Senses of Cinema)  Interviewer Aime Ancian adds that, “You have said that you consider dialogue akin to noise…” and, while Denis insists she isn’t so theoretical as to make blanket statements, she wouldn’t quite disagree either. She finds in music, touch, rhythm, dance, violence and sex a language that demands few words, an approach that manages to create ambiguity without quite generating confusion. Yet what Truffaut says about Ray might be as useful when trying to understand both Denis’ and von Trier’s ouevre. They are working something through, rather than producing a work which fits neatly into patterns of narrative and stylistic conformity.

It should nevertheless be noted that when Truffaut made his remarks about Ray, there were other auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford who weren’t creating interpretive problems for viewers. Sure, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Ford’s The Searchers defied viewer expectations, as the former ends tragically, and the latter cannot quite incorporate its hero into the future of the homestead. But most of the directors’ films could be watched easily by a viewer with no feeling that they need to view more films by either filmmaker to better understand the film they had just seen. Cahiers critics might have perceived all sorts of specific qualities in a given director’s work, but viewers would have watched a solidly executed piece of quality entertainment.  Jacques Rivette could say of Otto Preminger, “Preminger believes first in mise en scene, the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space” (Cahiers du Cinema: the 1950s). But the average punter didn’t need to know that to have a good time watching The Moon is Blue, Anatomy of a Murder and Bonjour Tristesse.  Von Trier, hugely, and Denis, to a lesser degree, demand a broader context to be comprehended, and that context is centrally their other films.

Where does this leave our third and final auteur, Martin Scorsese? Writing on Scorsese’s early feature Mean Streets, Pauline Kael reckoned it “is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking.” (Reeling) Yet this is personal in a different way from von Trier or Denis. Scorsese is drawing on his milieu in Little Italy, and the director would go on in other films to offer violent visions of New York: in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas. But though Taxi Driver has camera shots and cuts that break with convention, and an ambiguous, puzzling conclusion, most of the director’s work can be deemed personal without quite demanding we see a few Scorsese films to comprehend his sensibility. Like many a great filmmaker, Scorsese’s work benefits from viewing a handful of them, seeing how his themes of personal identity, male insecurity, troublesome conviviality, and explosive alienation align with a style usually capable of keeping a viewer on edge. But it doesn’t necessitate it.

Yet it is always useful in understanding a director’s work, however obscure their preoccupations or expected their themes, to choose a detail that shows up in several films. Whether it is Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or After Hours, mirrors are often prominent in Scorsese’s work, creating a self-reflective space for his interest in characterisation over narrative. When Bickle looks in the mirror in Taxi Driver and asks ‘are you talkin’ to me?’, or La Motta prepares for a show at the end of Raging Bull, where he recites lines from various great writers by talking to himself in the mirror, it is consistent with the voice-overs in Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street and even The Age of Innocence, where it is much more detached. It gives to the director’s films a reflective immediacy, a paradoxical term that nevertheless captures an aspect of Scorsese’s ability to generate dramatic force within the context of characters who might not always like what they have become or have failed to become. In Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, the characters are failures, while in Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull and The Wolf of Wall Street, they have become successful. But, usually, this success reveals a greater failure as they betray friends, wives, their families or values, if they ever had them. The mirror and the voiceover are two ways Scorsese creates a characterisational schism and allows him to explore the minds of his characters more vividly than many American directors confined by the story’s demands. In Scorsese’s best work, the narrative is only half the story. Bickle will aim to kill a politician, and instead goes on to slay some pimps. La Motta will become world middleweight champion, but fails in winning the fight to control his appetites and his paranoia, and ends up overweight and alone. Even in a black screwball comedy like After Hours, Paul Hackett doesn’t get the girl he went out into the night to seduce, but instead finds himself harassed and humiliated by various figures he encounters on his very long, very funny, dark night of a mediocre soul.

Yet to understand more broadly Scorsese’s work, we can concentrate on two of these famous scenes: the monologue in the mirror in Taxi Driver, and the rehearsal at the end of Raging Bull. In the former, Travis Bickle is alone in his room, and yet far from alone in his head. As he stands in front of the mirror, he creates a scenario where he gets into an altercation. And so he says, “You talkin’ to me”, in this now-famous line, and adds, “while I’m the only one here” after he turns around to see if anyone is behind him. Though we have noted it is a monologue in the mirror, this is both true and not true. At the beginning of the scene, we do see it before Scorsese whip pans from Bickle’s reflection to Bickle himself, and then after the film cuts, he may diegetically be looking in the mirror, but De Niro is actually looking at the camera. Scorsese could have held the shot with Bickle looking into the glass, and Scorsese’s camera off at an angle as it incorporates both Travis and the mirror in the shot. But part of the scene’s force is that it becomes a confrontation both between Bickle and his imaginary foe in the glass, and the viewer who is being confronted by Travis. Strictly speaking, this may not be breaking the fourth wall (as Godard often does, Woody Allen offers in Annie Hall, and that Scorsese shows on several occasions in The Wolf of Wall Street), but it can create an uncanny version of it. Bickle looks at the mirror, but De Niro also looks at us. It adds to the feeling that the character is so desperate and alienated that he will find anybody to engage with, and this is not only the person he conjures up in his head as he looks for a confrontation. It is also with the viewer who is uncomfortably placed in a story that constantly pushes its own formal boundaries. It is there in that whip pan (rather than a shot-counter-shot), just as it is there in other moments in the film: the 360-degree shot in the garage, a lap dissolve without any time lapse, an arbitrary camera movement in a corridor, overhead insert shots. It is evident too in a slow-motion repeated shot as Bickle turns towards the mirror/audience in the scene.

Most of these formal choices feel exactly that: choices the director makes, rather than conventions the filmmaker adopts. Take the lap dissolve, for example. Usually when a filmmaker adopts it, the film illustrates a temporal transition. Here, Scorsese shows Bickle walking along the street, dissolves, and shows him still walking along the same road. Overhead inserts are usually offered to convey important information or to show a scene of strong violence in detail. It might be a close-up of a letter a loved one has sent, or a person getting a bullet in the knee. When Scorsese uses it to show Bickle getting handed a document, or spreading his hands over a table, it gives us no significant detail that justifies the insert. Such shots give to the film an arbitrary quality that isn’t the same thing as saying such moments are pointless. We could claim they are formally pointful – as if most shots in cinema are so integrated into the telling they have no purpose but to make the story visible, by making the form invisible. Scorsese may not be as radical as Godard or Resnais, and may have never again been quite as formally audacious as he is here. But he insists that the story he tells doesn’t have a given form; it has a chosen one.

This is one of the defining features of authorship alongside a particular problematic that the filmmaker explores. Yet this doesn’t mean that those who aren’t formally fresh automatically fail to be viewed as auteurs. This is one of the tricky aspects of Cahiers’ notion of authorship, one that can seem unclear for two reasons. Firstly, that it requires often very subtle analysis on the critic’s part. If many a viewer can see a large difference between a Preminger film like Anatomy of a Murder and Taxi Driver, a John Ford film as opposed to a Godard, how many can distinguish between a Howard Hawks film and a Ford? What is the difference between Hawks’ Red River and Rio Bravo, and Ford’s approach to the western in Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine? Many will just see a good western and view Hawks and Ford as both mastering the genre, and the formal properties required to manifest it. It will take very precise criticism to distinguish Hawks from Ford beyond the obvious. The obvious would be that Hawks’ range was much broader than Ford's, as he directed westerns, noirs, musicals, gangster films and screwballs. Ford is chiefly known for his westerns and war films. A good auteur critic would see in the breadth of Hawks’ work a consistency that would be much easier to find in Ford. Jacques Rivette describes it thus: “Hawks’ oeuvre is equally divided between comedies and dramas – a remarkable ambivalence. More remarkable still is his frequent fusing of the two elements so that each, rather than damaging the other, seems to underscore their reciprocal relation.” (Cahiers du Cinema: the 1950s). As Ford’s work lacks this ambivalence, his films will subsequently be quite different from Hawks’, and might help explain a sentimentality in Ford, while in Hawks we have “a harsh feeling of an existence in which no action can undo itself from the web of responsibility.” Rivette adds, “could we be offered a more bitter view of life than this?” Looking at classic Hollywood, we might see many similarities; Cahiers proposed we look at the authorship of small difference.

In this sense, Scorsese could more easily distinguish himself from his peers than Ford could from his contemporaries. Scorsese films don’t seem similar to those of Coppola, Spielberg, Altman, Ashby and Penn. Since the studio system had collapsed in the early 1960s, there was more room to innovate, and far more opportunities to be influenced by innovations elsewhere, as New Hollywood absorbed the new film movements in France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the UK. Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies stated, “Martin Scorsese himself counts Polish cinema as one of the major influences on his film style, alongside Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave.” Though there are many distinct uses of form in Raging Bull, and never more so than in the editing of the fight sequences, as it utilises different frame speeds and hard cuts to take us into the pain of the sport more readily than its glory, Scorsese opts for no cutting at all in Raging Bull’s closing scene. It is as though all the adrenaline of the boxing matches that emphasised the beatings has led to the closing moments where La Motta looks thoroughly defeated. His nose is large and shapeless, his body heavy and cumbersome, and the speech he will give, from Budd Schulberg, reflects his own life, even if it shouldn’t. After all, while in On the Waterfront Terry throws a fight that ends his career, La Motta might throw a fight too, as the film shows, but he goes on to become middleweight champion of the world. However, the difference between Terry and Jake is that Terry finds himself caught in circumstances he can’t avoid; Jake has spent years in a psyche he can’t escape.

The single-take scene captures the sluggishness of a man who was formerly known for his speed and movement, and while we should never reduce form to simple equations, the advantage New Hollywood filmmakers have over their classic Hollywood predecessors is that they have more freedom in making the form work for them on their own terms. The new waves of the 1960s freed filmmakers up to use faster cuts or longer takes, to break the fourth wall, or offer voice-over in more personal, diaristic ways, over pushing the story along. Scorsese’s work is thus indebted to the Europeans, but they also gave him a voice he could call his own, making it easier to distinguish his oeuvre from others of his generation than it would be to differentiate most classic filmmakers from each other. One could argue it made authorship easier to practice, and perhaps aptly so. The Cahiers critics saw distinctiveness where others had seen homogenisation, viewing classic Hollywood cinema not only as a mass-produced medium, but also as an art form that allowed individuals to offer creative work. In turn, these critics used this theoretical assumption to become auteurs themselves, and this too led to others in the 1960s to do likewise, and the New Hollywood filmmakers a decade later to insist on the same freedom. Whether the auteur theory is a strong one logically (aren’t there far too many voices involved in a film to claim authorship?), it became undeniably influential. It still hasn’t gone away, even if we have looked at filmmakers all now in their 70s and 80s to suggest how directors use the art form to produce a singular vision.


© Tony McKibbin