Auteurism: true or faux?

Barry Keith Grant's Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader presents an arresting, thoughtful procession of ideas about who makes a movie. For any professor pulling together a syllabus on film criticism, this book makes a natural, if inevitably more theoretical, companion volume to Phillip Lopate's American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now (2006).

The auteur theory can be defined as the now-pervasive idea that a director is the author of his or her movies, and that everybody else on a picture is, at best, only there to help. According to the theory's first American apostle, Andrew Sarris, auteurism has three main "criteria of value." To qualify as an auteur, a director must possess a) technical competence, b) a distinguishable personality, and c) something called interior meaning, which Sarris varyingly describes as either "soul" or, less metaphysically, "the tension between a director's personality and his material" (42-43).

In embryo, all three ideas appear in the first piece Grant includes, Francois Truffaut's epoch-making 1954 essay, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema." In it Truffaut focuses to a surprising degree on the work of two non-directing screenwriters, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, only to champion far above them the work of Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, and other writers who directed their own scripts.

Right after Truffaut comes a parade of other talented critics, including levelheadedly skeptical Andre Bazin, the agreeably director-besotted Sarris, and the bottomlessly wonderful Pauline Kael, who wisecracks her way into the book like Groucho Marx crashing a garden party. What is most refreshing about the book's whole rigorously chronological first third, devoted to "Classic Auteur Theory," is how conversational all these critics are--both tonally, and in their quote-happy eagerness to score points off their precursors.

The book's middle third, "The Contexts of Authorship," starts with Roland Barthes's influential 1968 essay, "The Death of the Author," before quickly scuttling back to more movie-specific writing. It also ricochets around in time, a scattershot approach that, compared to the first section, inevitably diffuses the impact. This sagging midsection isn't entirely Grant's fault, since just as mainstream movies have grown slightly unwatchable, much of scholarly criticism has become correspondingly unreadable. But the letdown is partly his fault, because--with the exceptions of Richard Corliss and Gore Vidal--by mid-book Grant is ignoring almost all interesting film writing outside of academia.

In Grant's defense, even good journalistic criticism about movies tends toward reviews and profiles. But that excuse won't fly in the final section, which is devoted exclusively to close readings such as Michael Budd on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, directed by Robert Wiene, written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer), and director studies like Grant's own solid, if jargon-bound, take on Kathryn Bigelow. Why leave out, say, The Baltimore Sun's Michael Sragow's fine work on Curtis Hanson, or Los Angeles City Beat critic Andy Klein's exegesis of Memento (2000, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan), both of which are every bit as rigorous as the scholarly studies included here, and far better written?

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Academic writing has taken its share of deserved lumps over the years, and piling on serves no useful purpose here. But what a pity to see Grant--an intelligent presence everywhere else in the book, and a graceful, well-organized writer in his impeccably lucid introduction--go all tweedy on us. His director fixation grows a mite tiresome, too. Sure, we get essays nominating everybody from the writer to the producer to the parent company as a movie's author, but in Grant's captions it's forever "Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine" (1998) or "Spike Lee's Malcolm X" (1992). Another mild annoyance is the complete absence of any writing before 1954. It might have been nice to include even some dated criticism from an earlier era, if only to give readers a fix on the assumptions that Truffaut and his inheritors have succeeded so thoroughly in upending.

The best critics in Auteurs and Authorship have all three of Sarris's auteurist criteria in spades. All but the most jargon-happy can put a technically competent paragraph together. Personality is harder to come by, but also more crucial. (An impersonal movie can still entertain, but impersonal criticism dies on the page.) And soul will always rank as the rarest critical attribute of the three. It takes not just fine filmmaking but a soulful, once-in-a-generation critic like Kael to talk a movie down off the screen and etch it permanently into our lives.

Kael can also crack you up, something almost nobody else in Auteurs and Authorship knows how to do. It is not at all frivolous to ask why this book isn't funnier. Of the fourteen filmmakers in Sarris's first "pantheon," Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Ernst Lubitsch were all fundamentally comic artists, and Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Renoir, and Orson Welles at least knew their way around a joke. But of the eleven auteurs who receive close readings in Grant's third and final section, only Hitchcock and Spike Lee have a funny bone in their bodies, and none of the living contributors except Kael, Corliss, and Vidal so much as cracks a smile. As any decent critic spends a lifetime asking: What's wrong with this picture?

DAVID KIPEN is the author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (2006).

Auteurs And Authorship: A Film Reader

Edited by Barry Keith Grant

Malden, MA: Blackwell publishing, 2008

323 pp./$89.95 (hb), $39.95 (sb)