film as art
the 'auteur'
by gordon graham
If film truly is the super-medium, should it not have come to outclass other art forms? Should the major works of modern art not be films? Film has not come to dominate the art world in this way. What then explains this gap between potential and actuality? Some of the explanation is socio-historical. Film may have the making of a super-art, but it is also an outstanding form of entertainment. The result is that the money for moviemaking has come largely from the entertainment industry. Accordingly, most of the effort that has gone into filmmaking has been devoted to this end, and to its commercial success. It is as if the primary efforts of painters had been devoted to wallpaper design. The contingent associations that this fact has given rise to have further circumscribed film's actual use as an artistic medium. 'Hollywood' does not have the same cultural resonance as 'Bayreuth', 'The Tate' or even 'Broadway'. The result is that among the countless films that have been made, relatively little of lasting artistic significance has emerged.
Commercial potential and cultural context have been important in the reception of film, but there is something in the nature of film itself which helps to explain its relatively modest contribution to art. The move to a super-medium is not all gain. There can also be loss. Where music accompanies film, for instance, it is possible for one to vie with the other for our attention, with the result that the impact of each, far from being heightened, is diminished. It is sometimes the case that the score for a film, or part of it, becomes a recognized piece of music in its own right, something that is worth listening to and better listened to on its own. (Some of Shostakovich's music is a good example.) Given modern conditions for the commissioning of music this may be an important way in which new compositions emerge, but taken by itself it is a mark of failure. The desirability of 'liberating' the music from the film demonstrates the existence of fragmentation where there ought to have been organic unity.
The potential scope for such fragmentation in filmmaking is immense. A film comprises the following elements: plot, dialogue, action, direction, screenplay, camera work, editing, score and special effects. When academy awards are made, frequently a film scores highly in only a few, sometimes only one, of these respects. Superb camera work can record a poor plot, brilliant special effects may follow ham acting, memorable music may accompany a trivial story, and so on. Of course, paintings, novels and musical composition can also be analysed by distinct elements which may differ in quality or even conflict with one another - colour versus subject, characters versus dialogue, harmony versus melody, for example. But there is still an important difference; in all these cases it is just such tensions that ought to be resolved by the creative imagination of a single mind - the painter, the author, the composer - whose greatness is measured in part by the degree of imaginative unity achieved. A film on the other hand has no single author.
Or so it can be argued. Another important point of discussion in the philosophy of film has been auteur theory. For some theorists, the concept of 'auteur' in film is applicable only to a body of cinematographic work. A director becomes an author not by making a single film but by developing an identifiable style exhibited through a body of film work - Hitchcock and Ford are authors by virtue of their distinctive visions. More everyday directors are not.
In a similar spirit it might be claimed that the writer of a single book, even if it is very well regarded (Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird would be a good example), can hardly be described as an author in a broader sense when compared to a writer like, say, Joseph Conrad whose style is extended over many works. But even if we were to agree that this is so, there is a striking disanalogy between the two cases. While there is no doubt about the identity of the artist with respect to one book or many, there can be different accounts of who is to be regarded as the author of a film, theauteur in a narrower sense.
The fact that this is a matter of dispute is a point of difference not just between movies and books, but between film and most of the other arts. It is also a fact to which sufficient attention is not always paid. The existence of any artwork requires more than one party - books have to be read, music played and listened to, pictures looked at - the assigning of books to their authors ('Tolstoy's War and Peace'), pieces of music to their composers ('Beethoven's Fifth') and pictures to painters ('Picasso's Guernica') is unproblematic. In the case of films this is not so. The most natural candidate for the role of auteur (in the narrow sense) is the director. Citizen Kane is regularly and repeatedly listed as one of the greatest films ever made and universally regarded as the work of Orson Welles. But though there are some instances such as this one where there is no practical uncertainty about authorship, this is not generally true.
Perhaps in many, even most, films the director is the principal influence on the final form of the film. Even so, the role of the director is properly thought of as one of choosing rather than creating. Directors do not construct the plot, write the screenplay, work the cameras, build the sets or compose the score. They do not always cast the parts, only occasionally appear in the film themselves, and usually oversee the final cut rather than directly editing it themselves. What this means is that the relation of the director to all these collaborators cannot be com- pared to that between the author of a play and those who perform it. This is demonstrated by the fact that whereas a good play can be performed badly, bad performance in a film makes it to that extent a poor film. Directors of films do not stand to the outcome of their efforts as playwrights do to theirs.
It is not a necessary truth about film that it has no single mind at work to control it. One can imagine one person superhumanly performing all these roles, and it is true that in some of the best films one person fills many roles. Perhaps it is not an accident that Citizen Kane is an outstanding film, because Orson Welles not only directed but took the lead role and wrote the screenplay. Yet, despite a few striking examples like this, it is an important fact about film as a medium that it has to combine the technical skill and artistic imagination of a great many people. Modern film is a multimedia art form that makes a single auteur practically impossible. Accordingly, its power to transcend the limits of any one medium - the purely visual for example - and to work with dynamic and not merely static images, is offset by its liability to fragmentation. The greater the power, we might say, the harder it is to control. If the greatest works of art are those that direct the attention of the audience to and through an imagined experience which in turn illuminates real experience, this is somewhat paradoxically less likely in film than in other arts, despite the powers at its disposal.
Thus Arnheim's purism and his anxiety about the introduction of elements other than the visual, though unwarranted on the basis of the reasons he gives, is not without some foundation. Interestingly Eisenstein, several of whose films are among those most fitted to Arnheim's analysis, went to extraordinary lengths to retain control over every aspect of the finished result. He was famous for the large number of immensely detailed drawings, diagrams and instructions he produced for the guidance of actors, camera- men and set builders. And where he used music he required it to 'be com- posed to a completely finished editing of the pictorial element' (Eisenstein 1943: 136).
This analysis of the inherent weakness in film as an art appeals to the principle that 'the greater the power, the harder it is to control'. The same principle does not work in reverse. It is not the case that 'the harder to control, the greater the power'. While it is true that the multifaceted character of film makes it a more powerful medium potentially, while at the same time increasing the tendency to fragmentation, it is a mistake to think that such power is possible only through multimedia. In fact, there is a medium that can completely transcend the limits of the visual, the aural, the static, the tangible and so on. This is the medium of language. Language allows us to create imaginative images of the visual, the aural, the narrative, the emotional, etc. These images are apprehended intellectually rather than sensually. Language has the power of film, we might say, without the disadvantages. Both the powers and the problems of the literary arts are the topic of the next chapter. But so far as the visual arts are concerned, the arguments of this chapter give us good reason to conclude that the ability of film to transcend the limitations of static visual images brings a further different limitation in its wake.
Summary
The word 'art' is often used to refer exclusively to visual art, and painting in particular. This tends to give prominence to the idea that representation is especially important in art. While it is true that much visual art is representational, representationalism or the belief that representational accuracy is of greater importance or value is mistaken, even in painting. Representation is a means and not an end in art. The ends it serves may be served in other ways, and can in fact be satisfied by wholly abstract painting. What matters is the value or importance of these ends. One of these is simply that of bringing visual experience itself to prominence. However, the visual arts can pass beyond the purely visual. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, they can supply us with images which capture and illuminate the non-visual states of emotion and character for instance.
What painting cannot do is depict the dynamic of a narrative or developing sequence. It is in this respect that film, while also a visual art, succeeds where painting fails. Film has the resources to construct and display dynamic visual images and may thus transcend the limitations of the static visual image. Its own weakness arises from the fact that it is a multimedia art, and this means that it is almost impossible for a film to be the result of a single directing mind. Films thus tend towards fragmentation. The sort of transcendence that film makes possible, but which remains in the control of a single author, seems to be available in literature. This is the next art form to consider in our discussion.