Chapter 14

Praising Great Directors: Auteur Theory

In This Chapter

Evolving from directors to auteurs

Debating the pros and cons of the auteur theory

Evaluating the careers of some major auteurs

Before auteur theory emerged in the 1950s, so-called serious art critics considered movies as rubbish. Now they’re often thought of as great works of art. How did this happen?

Well, many people argue that before you can talk about art, you need to have an artist, someone whose personal stamp you can detect on everything that they produce. Poets, authors, composers and painters all create the more ‘respectable’ art forms. In cinema, auteur theory places creative responsibility with the director.

After I define, dissect and debate auteur theory, in this chapter I also explore some good examples of individual auteurs of film history and of today. For ease of reference I have roughly grouped these film-makers chronologically: firstly, those who worked in the classical period of 1930 to 1960; secondly, those who emerged throughout the 1960s to the 1990s (most of whom are still active today); and, finally, some contemporary 21st century examples. In serving up these profiles, I had room to include only a select few, so how did I choose which made the grade and which were left aside?

• Firstly, there are several examples who have received so much attention within film studies that to leave them out would have been crazy. Stand up, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Orson Welles, for example.
• Secondly, I have included directors who’ve had less written about them but who have all produced a substantial legacy of films which are recognisably theirs in some interesting way or another.
• Finally, I have broadened my focus to include both commercially successful Hollywood film-makers (notably Steven Spielberg) and more idiosyncratic directors with well-known art house appeal (such as David Lynch).

Seeing the Director as God

Some directors may well see themselves as gods (still think you’re ‘king of the world’, Mr Cameron?), but plenty of humbler metaphors exist. You can think of the director as the conductor of an orchestra, making sure that all the creative elements synchronise perfectly and work in harmony. Or directors may function like creative blueprints, with all the people involved in the production trying to bring to life their own idea of ‘a Spielberg film’ or ‘a Scorsese film’.

Whichever metaphor you prefer, clearly the director is an important figure in today’s film culture. In order to understand why this is the case, you need to take a look back to the cinéphiles (film-lovers) of 1950s Paris, who analysed the themes, genre and mise-en-scène of popular movies to create the figure of the auteur.

Digging to the roots of auteur theory

As cinema flourished in the first half of the 20th century, critics writing about literature were free to examine poems, novels and plays in the light of an author’s biography and personality. These analysts of high art never thought to look for personal expression in the picture houses. For old-school elitists, movies were cheap and vulgar; for radical Marxists (see Chapter 13), they were mindless fodder that industrial overlords churned out to keep the workers’ minds off their dreary lives. Either way, nobody took film seriously.

Early avant-garde film-makers, such as Sergei Eisenstein (see Chapter 4), and artists from other mediums who experimented with film, such as Jean Cocteau, considered their work to be the polar opposite of corporate studio film-making (see Chapter 7). But the reach of their films was limited and had little impact on the general perception of Hollywood films as an industrial product (which I discuss in Chapter 9).

One country’s intellectual culture, however, was sympathetic to cinema – France. So that’s why they get to name all the key film studies terms in their own language.

François Truffaut started the whole auteur discussion. As a troubled, rebellious teen growing up in Paris in the 1940s, Truffaut took inspiration from the glut of American movies filling European cinemas after World War II. He gorged on films directed by John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Having been expelled from countless schools, he often watched three movies a day. This intensive viewing experience was vital for his later views on the stylistic and thematic connections between particular films.

Truffaut became a self-styled film critic and published an influential manifesto for cinema in 1954. His essay ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’ argues that:

• ‘Quality’ French cinema (mostly literary adaptation) was stultified, artistically bankrupt and dull, dull, dull. He didn’t mince words, old Truffaut.
• Most French directors were merely metteurs-en-scène (literally ‘someone who puts stuff into a shot’), meaning that they simply implemented the ideas of completed scripts passed to them by producers.
• Directors who had greater control over dialogue and story can be considered auteurs (‘authors’) of their work. This privileged list included serious film-makers such as Jean Renoir and Max Ophuls, but also the popular comedian Jacques Tati.

Truffaut’s case was hardly free from self-interest; he wanted a new film industry filled with young bucks such as himself. And that’s basically what happened: the French New Wave (for more see Chapter 11). But turning himself into an auteur only helped to strengthen Truffaut’s case.

Linking auteur, theme and genre

For Truffaut and his French New Wave chums such as Andre Bazin and Jean-Luc Godard, the true artists of the cinema weren’t the old-timers making respectable, quality films, but the Hollywood directors. The critical journal to which they all contributed during the 1950s, Cahiers du Cinéma, made a point of taking Hitchcock and Hawks as seriously as any European avant-garde film-maker, something that was genuinely revolutionary for film culture.

Working as a director in Hollywood during the studio era was a very different experience from shooting cheap films with your buddies on the streets of Paris. Most directors were employees of the studios, working under contract (see Chapter 9). They rarely wrote their own scripts, and so weren’t literal auteurs like Truffaut’s select few, and they almost never had the final say as to the content or style of their films. Nonetheless, the Cahiers critics argued that their bodies of work contained notable consistencies.

Auteur critics read recurring themes in a director’s work as an authorial signature, placed upon the films in question as if they were paintings. So for example:

• John Ford’s films are about the American landscape – and particularly the tension between domesticity and the wilderness.
• Hitchcock’s films often feature ‘ice maiden’ female leads: cool, blond women who are as much of a mystery as the twisting plotlines.
• Charlie Chaplin’s films often depict technology taking on a life of its own to comic effect.

Yet, perhaps perversely, the fact that many Hollywood auteurs worked within the confines of genre film-making (check out Chapter 5) only enhanced their claims to authorship. The auteur critics compared Ford’s westerns and Chaplin’s comedies to their contemporaries and found them to be superior due to their complex thematic content. In addition, if a film-maker was able to overcome restrictions, such as generic constraints or studio interference (as happened throughout Orson Welles’s career) then the auteur critics concluded that they must qualify as an artistic genius.

American critic Andrew Sarris gave ‘the auteur theory’ its catchy title in an article for New York’s Village Voice in 1962. Sarris made an explicit connection between recurring themes across a director’s body of work and the director’s own personality, or – to use Sarris’s own term – the artist’s ‘élan of the soul’. Sarris used this extremely Romantic criterion (see this chapter’s sidebar ‘The Romantics: This time it’s personal’) to create his own selected band of auteurs, including Hollywood and European avant-garde film-makers.

Seeing the auteur in mise-en-scène

As I discuss in Chapter 4, mise-en-scène is the stuff of film-making – sets, props, actors and so on – as well as how everything looks up on the screen. These elements are certainly the parts of the film-making process over which the director has most control, and so unsurprisingly auteurist film critics most closely scrutinise these aspects. Detailed, careful analysis of style within mainstream popular film-making was just as ground-breaking in the 1950s and early 1960s as the notion of directorial authorship – and was vital in the development of film studies as a discipline.

Although you can criticise the use of themes as authorial signatures or stamps (on the grounds that they’re narrative elements often present in the script, over which the director may have very little control), in contrast, mise-en-scène analysis with an auteurist bent examines visual motifs and other stylistic elements to establish authorial presence.

Take a closer look at the mise-en-scène in a still (Figure 14-1) from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The setting is clearly industrial, a modernist factory with art deco fixtures that bring to mind Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The grid lines of the large windows create a sense of imposing space, which diminishes the human figures in the frame. The workers are dressed in dirty uniforms that expose their arms, providing visual contrast between machinery and the human body.

But the most important element of the mise-en-scène here is the director/star himself. Chaplin is smaller than the other actors, setting him apart. His physical performance in this sequence is one of increasing mania, as his rapidly repeated movements take over his body and bring chaos to the factory floor. The character Chaplin plays is literally crushed by the wheels of industry, but Chaplin the comedy star and director remains firmly in charge of the mechanical mise-en-scène, imposing his physical presence to wildly comic effect.

As this example demonstrates, nothing of what you see on screen is accidental, and you can read all elements as signalling authorial presence. Chaplin the actor, director, screenwriter and producer is probably as close to being the author of his films as possible within the Hollywood system. In this scene, he may be referencing German Expressionist films to construct a satire of the dehumanising effects of technology, but he’s also, fundamentally, being very, very silly indeed. And that’s the true nature of Chaplin’s genius.

Debunking auteur theory

Auteur theory was an important step in order for film studies to become a standalone discipline. It provided a critical framework that allowed critics to take popular cinema as seriously as avant-garde or art films and generated some fantastic close readings of film style and form. It also enabled the French New Wave by handing creative control to ambitious young directors, as well as inspiring plenty of other film-makers around the world. But does it stand up as a rigorous methodology?

One of the most interesting effects of auteur theory is that it sparked many arguments in the public sphere of film criticism. Andrew Sarris, the critic who brought Truffaut’s ideas to the American public (and incidentally was the first to call it an actual ‘theory’) was soon locked in a productive debate with the lead critic of The New Yorker, Pauline Kael. Table 14-1 summarises their entertaining face off.

To be fair to auteur criticism as a whole, Sarris’s essay, although influential, is a bit of an easy target. The writings of auteurist critics in the British journal Movie (1960–1990) are much more clearly argued and based upon detailed analysis of evidence from the film texts. The Movie method was also established as the foundation of film studies as an academic discipline in the UK after its main critics VF Perkins, Robin Wood and Charles Barr became the first film professors (for more on these pioneers, see Chapter 17). Meanwhile Peter Wollen and others substantially developed the basic ideas of auteur theory (see the sidebar, ‘Reshaping Auteur Theory’).

Table 14-1 Andrew Sarris Versus Pauline Kael on Auteur Theory

Critical debate is never a bad thing, and despite the backlash auteur theory helped to legitimise the serious study of popular culture, for which everyone – not least the writer of this particular book – is very grateful.

Encountering Old-School Auteurs (1930s to 1950s)

The first directors that auteur critics took seriously were those who worked during the studio era of Hollywood (and elsewhere). They didn’t necessarily set out to be great artists, but they all produced inspiring bodies of work within industrial and generic constraints. Whatever you feel about auteur theory, the following directors’ careers helped to shape the discipline of film studies, and they each made films that easily stand the test of time.

John Ford: The American landscape

When a young, over-enthusiastic Jean-Luc Godard interviewed John Ford for Cahiers du Cinéma in the late 1950s, he asked ‘What brought you to Hollywood?’ and Ford responded ‘a train’. This bit of industry legend survives because it sums up Ford’s bluff, no-nonsense response to the many accolades he received throughout his long career. Ford directed more than 140 movies, won four Oscars for directing (still an industry record) and was the first recipient of the American Film Institute’s (AFI) Lifetime Achievement Award in 1971.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Ford’s work include:

• Absent family: In Ford’s films the home is a vital touchstone, and so when family members go missing someone must find or avenge them. See: My Darling Clementine (1946), The Searchers (1956), Donovan’s Reef (1963).
• Cowboys and Indians: Although Native Americans are bad guys in most of his westerns, during his later career Ford spoke of his sympathies for the Native American cause. The jury is still out. See: Stagecoach (1939), Cheyenne Autumn (1964).
• The Wild West: Ford’s favoured wide compositions place human figures against nature and history. He often shot on the spectacular location of Monument Valley in Utah and Arizona. See: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).
• Playing the fool: Many of Ford’s staunch heroes are set against foolish sidekicks, often played by his brother Frank. See: Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), Young Mr Lincoln (1939).

Critical reputation

John Ford’s importance for Hollywood history can hardly be overstated. His status within film studies was secured as soon as the auteurist critics turned their attention to Hollywood and found unifying themes and style across so many popular and influential films. His powerful personality is certainly stamped upon his best work. Ford is often cited as an influence on other directors; Orson Welles claimed to have watched Stagecoach 40 times while making Citizen Kane (1941) – check out ‘Orson Welles: The self-styled genius’ later in this chapter.

Where to start

The Searchers has it all: spectacular, burnt orange landscapes; a moving child kidnap plot; a classic Max Steiner score; and John Wayne being John Wayne. Oh, and one of the best endings ever shot.

Howard Hawks: Screwball and highballs

Howard Hawks was born in 1896 to wealthy industrialists. He was an Ivy League graduate in engineering, but from an early age was more interested in fast cars and racing. He also flew planes in his military service. Upon moving to Hollywood he consolidated his network of ‘men’s men’, produced his own silent shorts and was soon taken on by Fox as a director. He later moved from studio to studio with unusual freedom. He went on to write, produce or direct around 50 films, but only won an Honorary Oscar in 1975.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Hawks’s work include:

• Variety is the spice of life: Unlike most auteur directors, Hawks was renowned for work in many different genres, including war films such as Only Angels Have Wings (1939), musicals like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and even sci-fi – he certainly produced The Thing from Another World (1951) and probably directed it, although he gave the official credit to Christian Nyby so he could get Directors Guild membership.
• One of the guys: His films often contain scenes of male bonding within macho groups – see Hatari! (1962) – but he also gives screen time to strong (some may say) masculine women, including Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944).
• Role reversals: Many of Hawks’s screwball comedies play with switching roles: male/female (I Was a Male War Bride (1949)), adult/child (Monkey Business (1952)), controlled/chaotic (Bringing Up Baby (1938)).
• Snappy dialogue: Hawks worked closely with his favourite screenwriters to produce rapid-fire, often overlapping dialogue that creates pace and zip. In His Girl Friday (1940), Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell trade lines such as: ‘You’re wonderful, in a loathsome sort of a way’.

Critical reputation

If Hollywood’s true genius is found in its professionalism, fun and sheer unbridled energy then Howard Hawks is Hollywood. He hated ‘message movies’ which preached to their audience, was unconcerned with visual style and repeated the same plot devices over and over again – but he knew how to entertain an audience. Actually, Hawks’s tendency to repeat plots across different genres makes him a darling of the auteur-structuralist approach (see Chapter 15). His powerful female characters have also received attention from feminist film scholars.

Where to start

If you don’t get a kick out of watching kooky Katharine Hepburn torturing uptight Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, you’re probably clinically dead. The movie even has a leopard wandering down the street in Connecticut for heaven’s sake.

Alfred Hitchcock: The master of suspense

With his portly frame and haughty demeanour, Alfred Hitchcock is surely the most recognisable of all film directors. This fame is no accident, because Hitchcock was a master showman and self-publicist, appearing in trailers, TV shows and often within his own films as an uncredited extra. His status as a celebrity director leant him great power over his own career. Hitchcock was English and worked in the British film industry for nearly 20 years before moving to Hollywood in 1940. His legacy of popular and artistically ambitious thrillers produced on both sides of the Atlantic make him a heavyweight auteur.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Hitchcock’s work include:

• Guilt and innocence: Hitchcock’s heroes are often falsely accused men as in The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959), whereas his heroines are mysterious or guilty women as in Blackmail (1929) and Vertigo (1958).
• The killer inside: Psychopaths and sociopaths lurk within domestic environments, not just in Psycho (1960), but also in The Lodger (1927) and Rope (1948).
• Dissecting stardom: Hitchcock explores the darker sides of several much-loved and wholesome stars including Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (1954) and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946).
• Look and listen: Hitchcock’s visuals are influenced by German Expressionism as in The Wrong Man (1956) and Soviet montage in that shower scene, but his experimental use of sound was just as striking, especially in early British sound film Blackmail.

Critical reputation

In interviews, Hitchcock deliberately played with ideas derived from psychology, including sadism (torturing the audience) and voyeurism (looking at things you shouldn’t). So unsurprisingly a fair proportion of the many critical readings of his films are psychoanalytical in nature, some of the best being those by Robin Wood. Hitchcock’s American films received far more attention from early auteurists than his British ones, an imbalance that Tom Ryall and Charles Barr have since corrected.

Where to start

If you’ve already watched Psycho, check out Vertigo. It has a gorgeous expressionistic use of colour, an icy (dyed) blonde heroine and an incredible score by Bernard Herrmann. But most of all, it’s utterly deranged and disturbed.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: Two for the price of one

Wait a minute, who exactly is the auteur here? The answer is both. English director Michael Powell and Hungarian screenwriter Emeric Pressburger were very different personalities, but they worked so closely together on a series of great British films that they took joint credit for writing, directing and producing. Alexander Korda brought them together at the start of World War II and they set up The Archers production company in 1943. They produced a string of popular and acclaimed films before Powell’s career (without Pressburger) was destroyed by the failure Peeping Tom (1960).

Themes and style

Key aspects of Powell and Pressburger’s work include:

• Poetry and propaganda: During World War II they produced films with propaganda agendas; 49th Parallel (1941) aimed to bring the US into the conflict. They also caused controversy by making a sympathetic German soldier the true hero of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).
• Flights of fantasy: Their films stand out from the realist tradition of British cinema (see Chapter 10), because they’re wildly imaginative and fantastical, notably A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947).
• Highbrow ambitions: They were unafraid to tackle opera in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), ballet in The Red Shoes (1948) or even Geoffrey Chaucer in A Canterbury Tale (1944).
• Technicolor dreams: Powell gave legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff his first major feature in A Matter of Life and Death, and his Technicolor photography gives many of their films a dreamlike beauty.

Critical reputation

Powell’s joint authorship with Pressburger is still so unusual in the film industry that it creates an interesting and important challenge to the auteurist cult of the individual (you could also think about the Coen Brothers and the Wachowskis in this light). Powell and Pressburger’s love of myth and escapist fantasy also undermines the commonly held view that the Brits only make grim realist films. Surviving relatives have tended their legacy: Powell’s widow is Martin Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker and Pressburger’s grandsons are the film-makers Andrew and Kevin Macdonald.

Where to start

If you think you don’t like classic British films, just try A Matter of Life and Death. It’s funny and deeply moving, looks incredible (thanks to Jack Cardiff) and its brilliant use of colour serves as a twisted mirror image of The Wizard of Oz (1939), in that here reality is in gaudy Technicolor and heaven in pearly black and white.

Orson Welles: The self-styled genius

Orson Welles didn’t need auteur theory to turn himself into a genius, but it helped. Born to an influential Chicago family, he was a prodigious child musician but later rejected a Harvard scholarship in order to travel to Europe. In Ireland he bluffed his way onto the stage where he became an instant success, and he was directing major stage shows in New York by his early 20s. His radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938 reportedly prompted national panic. RKO then granted him an unprecedented level of freedom for an unproven director, and the result was Citizen Kane (1941). His career was troubled, but the films he left behind are among the most ambitious in Hollywood’s history.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Welles’s work include:

• Tragic heroes: Welles knew what to steal from Shakespeare – heroes with grand ambitions but also tragic flaws that bring them down in the end. See: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
• Actor-director: Welles acted in many of his own films but also took work for other film-makers, playing memorable villains in The Third Man (1949) and A Man for All Seasons (1966).
• Deep focus: Andre Bazin loved Welles for his deep framing, which often has several planes of action going on simultaneously. Look at an early scene in Citizen Kane, which frames its hero as a child playing outside in the snow while his fate is decided by his poor parents inside the house.
• The illusionist: Welles was a well-known amateur magician, and his love of theatrical illusion crops up in his films. Check out the transformation of the house in Magnificent Ambersons from a winter’s day to a summer’s evening through clever lighting effects.

Critical reputation

Two words: ‘Citizen’ and ‘Kane’. Welles’s first film was audacious, and it came along at precisely the right time, when auteurist critics were looking for the classics of cinema to rank alongside other art forms. It has since reigned almost unchallenged as ‘the greatest film ever made’.

Welles is the perfect Romantic auteur (see the sidebar ‘The Romantics: This time it’s personal’), because his genius burned brightly but not for long, and he was practically martyred by his biggest fans. As ever, Pauline Kael (see the earlier section ‘Debunking auteur theory’) provided some measure of reason to the debate; although she was a fan, she argued convincingly not to overlook the contributions of his collaborators.

Where to start

Welles was great as a stage impresario in The Muppet Movie (1979). I’m kidding. Just watch Citizen Kane and see what the fuss is all about.

Meeting the Essential Modern Auteurs (1960s to 1990s)

Auteurism opened up a conversation about the cultural status of cinema and the role of the director that continued from the 1960s onwards. As this section demonstrates, modern auteurs had the artistic freedom to combine influences from Hollywood, Europe, world cinema and avant-garde films. Most of these directors are still working today, and longevity certainly helps cement their auteur status. If you’re familiar with their recent films, looking back to their earlier work will give you a much richer understanding of their creative personalities.

Stanley Kubrick: An epic perfectionist

Stanley Kubrick grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in New York City. His great love from an early age was photography, and in the 1940s and early 50s he became involved in the city’s modern art movement. He shot documentaries and low-budget war and crime films before a brief foray into Hollywood with Spartacus (1960). He moved to England to shoot Lolita (1962) and enjoyed the experience so much that he never permanently returned to the US. A notorious perfectionist, who shot hundreds of takes, and a virtual recluse, Kubrick produced challenging and controversial films until his death in 1999.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Kubrick’s work include:

• Behind the mask: Disturbing images of the human body obscured by masks or prosthetics recur in Kubrick’s films, including The Killing (1956), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
• Pushing boundaries: Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita challenged the censors and had to exclude explicit eroticism, while A Clockwork Orange wasn’t banned but was rather withdrawn from circulation in cinemas by the director himself after it was linked with a copycat killing.
• Careful composition: Kubrick lends his images a sense of heightened, composed reality, which makes them iconic, notably riding the bomb in Dr Strangelove (1963) and the star child of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
• A chilly distance: Don’t worry if you feel yourself held at a distance from his characters. Kubrick didn’t particularly care whether you care or not.

Critical reputation

As a self-styled ‘serious’ film-maker, Kubrick wasn’t loved by the original auteurists, but his reputation has grown in recent decades. Film critics and scholars commonly discuss Kubrick’s intellectual and arty films as part of grand ideas such as 20th-century modernism. However he also attracted charges of misogyny from feminist critics over his challenging representations of female sexuality.

Where to start

2001 is the original new-age sci-fi epic. Watch it and be impressed. And puzzled.

Martin Scorsese: Storyteller of the streets

Martin Scorsese was born in New York in 1942 to second-generation Sicilian-American parents and grew up in Manhattan’s colourful Little Italy district. He spent much of his childhood indoors suffering from severe asthma, and so trips to the cinema were a powerful escape. He planned to be a priest and enrolled in Catholic College aged 14 before being kicked out for teenage behaviour. In 1966 he was one of the first graduates from New York University’s new Film School. B-movie producer Roger Corman was his early mentor, and he became friends with the influential ‘movie brats’ (a group of young, film-literate directors) including Francis Ford Coppola. He has been married five times and conquered cocaine addition, but now into his 70s he’s as popular and acclaimed as ever.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Scorsese’s work include:

• New York, New York: Scorsese’s most personal films are firmly rooted in the city and Italian-American community where he grew up. Before the 1990s clean-up, those streets were pretty mean. See: Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Gangs of New York (2002).
• Guilt and redemption: Scorsese’s characters are morally ambiguous, and many are involved in crime or violence. Guilt requires redemption, involving penance or suffering. In Raging Bull (1980), Jake la Motta hits rock bottom in prison before he shows any remorse for his violence.
• Moments in time: Freeze-frames mark moments of character development or disrupt the flow of time for dramatic or comedic reasons, such as the dwarf tossing in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
• Pop music: Mean Streets was one of the first movies to use well-known pop songs as a score, and his later films feature tracks from The Rolling Stones, Cream and Ray Charles.

Critical reputation

Scorsese is extremely movie-literate and modelled himself as an auteur after the European model of personal, independent film-making. His early films can therefore be compared to those of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave (see Chapter 11). In his later career, his gangster films are ripe for discussions of masculinity and contemporary ethics. He’s a noted champion of film preservation, overseeing the restoration of many classics including films by Powell and Pressburger and Akira Kurosawa. Despite almost unanimous acclaim and popularity, he didn’t win an Oscar until 2006.

Where to start

Goodfellas (1990) is the perfect first Scorsese film with its tale of the rise and fall (or fall and rise) of a blue-collar gangster in New York. It’s funny, violent and stylish all at the same time.

Steven Spielberg: The kid who never grew up

Steven Spielberg was born in 1946, making him part of the post-World War II baby-boom generation. As the child of divorced orthodox Jewish parents he faced prejudice at school and started making (and exhibiting) his own 8 mm films at an early age. He was unsuccessful in applying to film school in California, but while working as an intern for Universal Studios, he made a short that won him a job directing for TV. His first feature film flopped, but his second, Jaws (1975), became such a huge hit that it forever changed the way studios release their films (check out Chapter 9 for details). His subsequent career has seen unparalleled popularity and profits.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Spielberg’s work include:

• The inner child: Spielberg’s films aim to capture the wonder and excitement of childhood and often have child (or childish) protagonists, as in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Hook (1991) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).
• High concept: Hollywood likes ideas that can be grasped immediately. What if someone brought back the dinosaurs? What if Peter Pan grew up? What if the authorities were able to catch murderers before they killed? That’ll be Jurassic Park (1993), Hook and Minority Report (2002) in a nutshell.
• Emotional storytelling: Spielberg isn’t afraid of big emotional moments and often uses close-ups to capture actors’ awestruck reactions to off-screen events. See: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jurassic Park.
• Keep on moving: Spielberg’s films are packed with movement, most obviously from his action-hero characters, but also generated by his fluid camera, which often moves rather than cuts, as in the Omaha beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan (1998).

Critical reputation

Spielberg’s enormous popularity came before his critical rehabilitation. For a long time he was blamed for the ‘dumbed down’ blockbuster mentality of contemporary Hollywood. But being this successful for so long doesn’t happen by insulting your audience’s intelligence. Spielberg is a master craftsman and a highly effective storyteller. If you want to understand Hollywood cinema, with all its associated pleasures and political compromises, his films are a perfect place to start.

Where to start

Spielberg’s films are so familiar that engaging with them critically can be challenging. So try watching his early made-for-TV movie Duel (1971) to spot those Spielberg moments of tension, surprise and kinetic excitement.

Quentin Tarantino: Uber-movie-geek

Quentin Tarantino came from humble beginnings in Tennessee and grew up in Los Angeles. He hated school and left as soon as possible, but he was obsessive about movies from an early age. He was taken to R-rated movies by his mother and her boyfriends. Later, as an employee of a porn theatre and then famously a video store, he was exposed to all varieties of extreme and cult films. He had some training as an actor but is a self-taught director. His debut, the heist movie Reservoir Dogs (1992) was an immediate hit, and although he’s not the most prolific of directors, his films have generally matched critical approval with bankable success.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Tarantino’s work include:

• Stuck in the middle: Tarantino’s scripts are often nonlinear in structure, and so they start somewhere in the middle and may end with the beginning. In Reservoir Dogs, the audience sees events before and after the bungled heist but never the heist itself.
• Talk the talk: Characters chat about all kinds of banal stuff, with banter and pop-culture references filling entire sections of Pulp Fiction (1994) and the tense ‘guess who’ scene of Inglourious Basterds (2009).
• Pleasure and pain: Extreme violence is never far away in Tarantino’s universe and is often visualised in excruciating detail, including decapitations in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and the car as weapon in Death Proof (2007).
• Hollywood and beyond: Tarantino’s role models are wide-ranging, from the French New Wave to Hong Kong action cinema to legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman.

Critical reputation

If you want to try and explain postmodernism to someone, probably the easiest way is to say: ‘You know Pulp Fiction? Like that.’ Tarantino’s films tick all the postmodern boxes: generic deconstruction, check; pop culture meets high culture, check; nostalgia, check. His films are also vital examples in debates around cinema violence and its impact on audiences. Although Tarantino is a vocal critic of film school, he’s a clear advocate for engaging with the whole of film history, from cult films to great classics. He’s also probably the most-cited director in current film-student essays and dissertations.

Where to start

Reservoir Dogs has all the Tarantino trademarks but none of the self-indulgence: horrific violence, hilarious dialogue, clever structure, perfect use of cheesy music. It’s all right there.

David Lynch: The American nightmare

Lynch grew up moving from small town to small town in Middle America, which provided him with the settings of many of his later films. He didn’t get on with formal education but thrived as a student of painting in Philadelphia. He moved to Los Angeles with his wife and young daughter and received a small grant from the AFI to make Eraserhead (1977), a disturbing surrealist vision of parenthood. Despite his idiosyncratic style he has produced notable commercial successes, including The Elephant Man (1980) and his TV murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–1). His odd personality and strange behaviour make him the subject of much intrigue.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Lynch’s work include:

• Small-town America: Lynch’s films and TV shows reveal dark desires lurking behind brightly painted facades. Blue Velvet (1985) and Twin Peaks are notably creepy, but Lynch also made the affectionate and quietly moving The Straight Story (1999) about a dying man’s travels through Americana.
• Dream logic: Nothing is what it seems, different actors may play the same character and stories shift inexplicably in space and time. See: Mulholland Dr. (2001), Inland Empire (2006).
• Symbolic motifs: Lynch uses visual motifs that are repeated across his films, such as lighting matches, moving road markings lit by headlights and female torch singers. These invite endless speculation as to their meaning, partly because Lynch steadfastly refuses to explain them.
• Music lover: Lynch has released his own weird music and the sound in his films is equally distinctive. He blends 1950s pop tunes with jazz and melodramatic classical scoring, while industrial white noise throbs in the background.

Critical reputation

Lynch has never been short of critical attention, though he generally refuses to offer explanations for his mysterious work. His films and TV shows fit well within an understanding of postmodernism, in that they smash the barriers between high and low culture and constantly question stable identity and meaning. Lynch’s surrealism also invites psychoanalytical readings around sexuality and violence. In his more recent films, the narrative logic has become more and more complex, inviting comparisons with other puzzle films such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) – check out the later section ‘Christopher Nolan: Worlds within worlds’.

Where to start

Blue Velvet is a remarkable, candy-coloured film noir with a square-jawed hero, a sadomasochistic femme fatale and a terrifying villain played by Dennis Hopper. Just don’t watch it at home alone.

Turning Attention to 21st Century Auteurs (1999 to today)

Only time will tell whether the film-makers in this section join the ranks of the greatest auteurs, but the early champions of Hitchcock and Welles didn’t let that bother them, so why should you.

Plenty of contemporary film-makers aside from those I include in this section have serious auteur potential: David Fincher, Sofia Coppola and Peter Jackson to name but a few. Try to keep track of your favourite director’s work, the awards they win, how critics and audiences talk about them, and whether their films seem to become more important as time moves on, and you could watch them blossom into fully fledged auteurs.

Ang Lee: The hidden dragon

Ang Lee’s life and films are the very definition of transnational. He grew up in Taiwan, to Chinese parents, but was a theatre student in the US. Experiments with film-making gained him entrance to Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where he trained alongside another famous Lee (Spike), but he didn’t release his first feature until he was 37. His surprise hit The Wedding Banquet (1993) opened doors in Hollywood, where he worked in diverse genres and styles. In 2006 he became the first Asian director to win an Oscar for directing Brokeback Mountain (2005), and he won a second for Life of Pi in 2012.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Lee’s work include:

• Unspoken desires: Lee’s films are fuelled by repression, be it sexual in Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution (2007), emotional in The Ice Storm (1997) and Sense and Sensibility (1995), or, erm, something to do with gamma rays in Hulk (2003).
• East meets West: Lee’s early films are about characters caught between Chinese and American culture, and in his third, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), a traditional Taiwanese family faces pressures from globalisation.
• Global Chinese Cinema: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is by far the highest grossing foreign language film in the US, establishing a market for Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and stars such as Zhang Ziyi.
• The third dimension: Lee was the first director to win an Oscar for a 3D film with Life of Pi, which considered alongside Hugo (2011) and Gravity (2013) represents a new critical acceptance of the technology.

Critical reputation

Although Hong Kong action films and international epics such as The Last Emperor (1987) established Western awareness of Asian cinema, Ang Lee’s career represents a new phase in this relationship. His image as a softly spoken intellectual proves that you don’t have to be a bullish egomaniac to qualify as a contemporary auteur.

Where to start

The Wedding Banquet is a charming and effective culture-clash comedy. It’s sadly lacking in flying sword fights though.

Christopher Nolan: Worlds within worlds

Christopher Nolan was born in England but grew up on both sides of the Atlantic and has dual British-American citizenship. He taught himself to make films using basic 8 mm equipment, and although he studied English Literature at university he used his student years to develop 16mm short films. He self-financed his first feature Following (1998), which attracted enough attention on the festival circuit to get him a deal for Memento (2000), a mind-bending indie thriller that was a critical and commercial hit. His dark and gritty reboot of the Batman character has been so successful that he now has the power to produce challenging films with blockbuster budgets.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Nolan’s work include:

• Memories are made of this: Nolan’s films play with the relationship between stories and memory, and his characters are often psychologically damaged. In Memento, his hero has no long-term memory and Inception (2010) is about implanting fake memories.
• Russian dolls: In Nolan’s short Doodlebug (1997), a man squishes a bug only to find that it’s a miniature version of himself and that he’s next for the boot. A similar, infinitely expandable logic structures Inception’s multiple parallel worlds.
• Realistic fantasies: Batman Begins (2005) cuts out the baroque archness of superhero movies to produce something raw and believable, whereas The Dark Knight (2008) blends hand-held camerawork and improvisation with enormous spectacular set pieces shot on large-format and high- definition IMAX film stock.
• Moral uncertainty: Nolan’s films have few clear-cut heroes and villains, and threats are sudden and mysterious in origin – inviting comparisons with American society’s climate of fear and uncertainty post-9/11.

Critical reputation

Nolan is a key postmodern auteur because he appears to make personal, distinctive films within the Hollywood mainstream. He has legions of passionate supporters, demonstrating that directors are clearly considered the primary authors of their films within popular film culture. Fans and students discuss Nolan’s nonlinear stories alongside those of Tarantino, David Lynch and others as puzzle films, which deconstruct themselves for the pleasures of a postmodern audience.

Where to start

You need to watch Memento at least twice to understand its intricate plotting. Luckily the steamy, noir-ish story is well worth the required effort.

Kathryn Bigelow: Boys and their guns

Kathryn Bigelow is certainly not the only acclaimed female director. That list would also include Jane Campion, Mira Nair and many others. However, Bigelow is an unusual case of a female auteur, in the sense that she has produced a body of distinctive and (some would say) personal films – within the Hollywood mainstream. Bigelow came to film-making through painting and avant-garde film culture and was tutored by auteur-structuralist scholar Peter Wollen (see sidebar ‘Reshaping Auteur Theory’ above). A string of successes put her on the directing A-list, until the commercial disaster of Strange Days (1995). For her comeback film, The Hurt Locker (2008) she was not only the first woman to win Best Director at the Academy Awards, but also beat fellow nominee and ex-husband James Cameron.

Themes and style

Key aspects of Bigelow’s work include:

• Boys’ films: Bigelow made her name working in genres traditionally seen as masculine – horror, cop thrillers and war movies. Some critics claim that her films deconstruct these genres through excess: too much of everything that audiences love about them (guns, explosions and so on).
• Packing a pistol: Guns are cinema’s primary phallic symbols (honestly). So in Blue Steel (1989), when a female cop and a male thief battle for possession of a pistol, more is clearly at stake than just weaponry.
• Points of view: Bigelow frequently employs shots that reflect characters’ points of view, playing with perception and notions of first-person narration. This theme is the entire plot of Strange Days, but also features in the chase sequences of Point Break (1991).
• Casualties of war: Although Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker was a legendary comeback, Bigelow’s follow-up, Zero Dark Thirty (2012), split critics over its apparent support of torture in the war on terror.

Critical reputation

Bigelow’s awareness of film theory (and ability to cite it in interviews) means that her apparently glossy and superficial movies are ripe for alternative readings. Her concern with looking and vision, particularly around issues of gender and violence, are easily connected to Laura Mulvey’s theories about the ‘male gaze’ of cinema (see Chapter 13). The big question posed by Bigelow’s career is: why is she the only recognised female auteur of popular cinema? Well, others might qualify, such as Penny Marshall – actor, prolific producer and director of Big (1988) and A League of Their Own (1992) – but unfortunately Marshall’s aren’t the kind of films that get (mostly male) film critics excited. Bigelow plays the big boys at their own game.

Where to start

Point Break is perfect for film students in that it’s supremely entertaining and deceptively smart. Also, don’t Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze make a lovely couple?

Guillermo del Toro: Monster moviemaker

Guillermo del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised a strict Catholic. While working as a special-effects make-up artist, he was also busy writing and directing short films and setting up film festivals in his home town. His first feature Cronos (1993) was an international film-festival favourite that led Miramax to fund his second film. After an initial unhappy encounter with Hollywood, he made his next two films as Mexican-Spanish co-productions to great acclaim. For Hellboy (2004), del Toro was given greater control by the film’s producers, and since then has worked successfully on big-budget international projects, as a writer-director and as a producer.

Themes and style

Key aspects of del Toro’s work include:

• Metaphorical monsters: His remarkable monsters, including the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), whose eyeballs are in his hands, and the gigantic Kaiju of Pacific Rim (2013), are modern fairy tale creations, rich in symbolic meaning.
• Comic-book guy: He considers comic books as great popular literature and has adapted and directed Blade II (2002) and the Hellboy franchise.
• Mexican movies: Together with his friends Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, del Toro brought Mexican cinema to new international audiences and created strong links with Hollywood (see Chapter 12 for more on these ‘three amigos’).
• Director-producer: del Toro is just as happy producing films as directing them, and his recent production credits include The Orphanage (2007), Biutiful (2010) and the upcoming Kung Fu Panda 3.

Critical reputation

Guillermo del Toro’s status as an auteur straddles both senses of the term. He has made critically adored art films (Pan’s Labyrinth featured high on many lists of the best films of the 2000s lists) and Hollywood genre movies that nonetheless reflect a coherent artistic vision. His complex and visually intricate horror films reward socio-political readings. Del Toro’s success highlights the transnational reach of Hollywood, which has a long tradition of adopting the best film-makers from around the world, but he has maintained strong links with his native Mexico as well. Above all, del Toro confirms cinema’s connection to fairy tales, which need fantastic and horrific monsters.

Where to start

Yes, everyone loves Pan’s Labyrinth. But if you’re avoiding Hellboy because you’re tired of lame comic-book movies, you’re just wrong. Ron Perlman’s wisecracking cigar-smoking demon is an absolute hoot.