Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [49]
The critical piece was “Circles and Squares,” a lengthy polemic that she finished early in 1963 against the auteur theory. The premise of auteurism was that the strong, individual personality of a talented director was always visible in his films, and that it was necessary to examine how that personality provided crucial links in his entire oeuvre. Even if the film in question happened to be a routine product of the Hollywood studio system, the auteurists held that a good director’s signature could be found if one knew how and where to look for it. The greater the talent, the clearer the indication of a powerful sensibility and characteristic visual style. Directors such as Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Robert Bresson, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford were all heroes to the auteurists, because their films displayed distinctive themes and stylistic traits. The rise of auteurism was a significant development in the gradual rise of the director in the general public consciousness, and many previously overlooked artists—including such figures as Phil Karlson and Joseph H. Lewis—who had languished in the shadows of the all-powerful stars were delighted to have attention refocused on their own efforts.
A prime example of an auteur hero is Douglas Sirk, the gifted German director who turned out a series of highly polished tearjerkers in the 1950s. The scripts assigned Sirk to direct were often clichéd romantic dramas, but he brought a striking edge to them. He considered the American family corrupt and unhealthy, and his films displayed a tension and pessimism that made many other directors’ portrayal of family life seem utterly fraudulent.
In 1962 auteurism attracted major notice in the United States when Andrew Sarris, then film critic for The Village Voice, wrote an essay about it for the Winter 1962–63 edition of Film Culture. “Notes on the Auteur Theory” laid out Sarris’s criteria for directors to achieve auteur status: the display of technical competence of a high order, a recognizable personal style or voice that could be traced from one film to another, and a powerful ability to convey interior meaning. As Sarris later said, “The strong director imposes his own personality on a film; the weak director allows the personalities of others to ran rampant.” He believed that the auteur theory was a crucial tool for understanding film history in that it allowed for the revelation of a kind of directorial autobiography, and the essay brimmed with affection for many little-known, overlooked, and misunderstood films. In his book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, Sarris wrote, “Ultimately, the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography. The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and artist. He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole. The parts, however entertaining individually, must cohere meaningfully. This meaningful coherence is more likely when the director dominates the proceedings with skill and purpose.”
“Notes on the Auteur Theory” was widely discussed in film-critic circles, and though it met with some skepticism, to be sure, its central premise was enthusiastically received, and would eventually result in Sarris’s developing an elaborately worked-out ranking of directors, which ranged from the “pantheon” (which included John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Josef von Sternberg, F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, and Robert Flaherty) to the bottom rank of “miscellaneous” directors in whose work Sarris could discern no striking personality (a group that numbered such figures as Gordon Douglas, Victor Fleming, Joshua Logan, Richard Quine, and W. S. Van Dyke).
Sarris was a critic whose opinions would vex Pauline for decades