Brian wrote: Why would that ability evaporate? Won't we be able to still tell the difference between a Manet and a Pollock? A Gershwin tune and a Cole Porter song?
Jerry: Well this is precisely the point. Just a few examples: Given a selection of text many people with a college education can tell the difference between most Shakespeare and Marlowe simply because they are familiar with Shakespeare and not with Marlowe. But leave out Shakespeare, and take two random texts from Elizabethan drama, maybe something from Middleton and something from John Fletcher, who but the experts among us could tell them apart.
Give me any random text from Shelley or Wordsworth and I will be able to distinguish the two, but nobody I know personally has this ability.
And very few of the young people I know can tell the difference between a Cole Porter and a Gershwin. It all sounds the same to them.
And who would know the difference Harold Arlen and Clarence Gaskill? Yet at the time the people who employed them in Hollywood and on Broadway knew exactly the difference between them... Gaskill's tunes, were straightforward, unsurprising, and always aimed at the popular catch; and Arlen's tunes were sly, harmonic, and hummable. I look at paintings form my own pleasure, but with rare exceptions I cannot tell the difference between one impressionist painter and another. I know how much expertise it would take to do this.
My point is that 500 years from now the movies made in the sound era between 1935 and 1960 will be almost indistinguishable. What we take as individual distinctions are products of time and place our own rootedness in that time place.
>JM wrote: One can "tell" a Hitchcock movie from a movie by Hawkes
Brian wrote: Why put "tell" in quotes?
JM: Because already it takes a certain amount of expertise to tell these two apart. It may seem obvious to me and you but it doesn't seem obvious to everybody. And if one were to ask people to tell the difference between Howard Hawks of "His Girl Friday" and Capra of "Arsenic and Old Lace", most would say that as far as style they were both "Cary Grant" movies. And they would be correct, even if you and I have the expertise to see the difference in directorial style. The non-expert judgment that these movies are Cary Grant comedies is closer to the truth of things than the judgment that these movies were made by Hawks or Capra. Again I don't think that these judgments are necessarily the final word, but I believe the "star system" of commodity production had more to do with the "feeling" of aesthetic distinction in classical Hollywood films than any single author. And that "star system" was shaped by the studio system and the process of production was the production unit.
The fact that being able to "tell" the difference between Hawks and Hitchcock is now an expertise, and being able to tell the difference between a hawk and a handsaw is only a matter of sanity, should make you think about what this expertise is and why it exists. It is "now" an expertise, but at the time when the movies were made it was not. Studies I have read showed that audiences at the time could tell the differences between these movies, even if they had never heard of Hawks and Hitchcock. Perhaps they learned to tell the difference by being submerged in the aesthetic values of the time. Still, the audiences could also tell the difference between a Cary Grant movie and a Hitchcock movie. "His Girl Friday" was a Cary Grant movie and "Suspicion," staring Cary Grant, was a Hitchcock film. One of my points here is that the popular suspicion about classical Hollywood, shows more insight into how Hollywood movies were made than the idea that movies have "authors".
>JM wrote: but can one really tell one run of the mill director directing
an Andy Hardy movie from another run of the mill director
directing another Andy Hardy two months later?
Brian wrote: No. Not all directors are auteurs.
JM: Which is the problem with auteur theories of all types. My point is not to argue against the idea that films have authors. I don't think it is helpful to take Foucault's view and simply argue against the whole concept of "authorship", except to point out our own assumptions about "individual" authorship.
My larger point is that what ever we recognize as the individual distinction, difference or "signature" of any given Hollywood film had more to do with the "star system" than with any other factor and the star system at this time was integrated into the production processes of studio and unit.
> JM wrote: . . .able to distinguish individual style of one director from
another in the course of most television shows from the 70s and
80s.
Brian wrote: But when you can distinguish the style of a Curtis Harrington or Larry Cohen it is wonderful.
JM: Are you telling me that you are able to tell the difference between one director and another in junk like "Charlie's Angels" circa 1978?! Or (at best) the director of one "Rockford Files" from another? You certainly have a better eye than I have!
> JM wrote: Now days some television series have "house" styles determined
by the producers, but it is nearly impossible to tell one director from
another even when you know the directors well.
Brian wrote: That is just not my experience. I could always tell the difference between the different house directors on X-Files, for instance.
JM: Let me make clear. I don't own a television and I have watched this stuff on DVD. I am not an expert on X-files, but from what my girlfriend has shown me season by season, there were only a few episodes that stood out before they went to the wider screen ratio -- for instance "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space', and "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.") And these shows stood out for the depth of the writing and the fact that the directing allowed for plenty of visual jokes. Now I picked these shows at random and what I notice is that they were both written by Darin Morgan. If you can tell the direction of Rob Bowman apart from that of David Nutter, more power to you. This I would say is an expertise, that has little to do with what makes the show distinct. The individual signature of the show has more to do with the producers (and the time in which it was made, by the way) than with anything that a director will ever do.
In "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", I can tell, with out aid of credits, when Joss Whedon directs and writes. His direction takes a lot of care and uses a minimal amount of shot/reverse shot, more long takes, more tracking shots, interesting ways to establish the space of a scene, etc. But the show itself, in the popular imagination, was not distinguished by Whedon's directorial signature but by his production signature, and whether the audience knew Whedon's name or not (or Stephen J. Cannell from an earlier time) it seems to me that they often recognized the producers signature.
>
> > I am sticking strictly to Hollywood here because the "auteur" theory
> was developed to explain Hollywood conditions more than others.
>
> But auteur theory has evolved considerably since its first iteration.
>
> >JM: But if one seriously takes the "view" of the production unit, one can
> argue that the reason why styles stand out is that who ever organizes
> the production unit as working operation as such makes the style. Thus
> with few exceptions Selznick imparted a certain style to his films.
>
> Brian: Then why does NOTORIOUS look so different from DINNER AT EIGHT?
> Both were produced by Selznick and yet they look nothing alike. But
> NOTORIOUS does look like other Hitchcock films and DINNER AT EIGHT
> like other Cukor films.
JM: Well some Selznick productions were Hitchcock films, in the same way that a Capra movie could actually be a Cary Grant film. The star system works in mysterious way, along with economic and power struggles.
> >JM: But again isn't individual style in films itself a spin off of the "star"
> system and the market for "star" personalities?
>
> Brian: No, since the director's signature was never a selling point the way star
> personas were.
>JML the final step is that the persona-style of the director him/herself is
> marketed
to the public as a "Hitchcock" film or a "Capra" film.
Brian: It never happened with Capra and only with Hitchcock after the success of his television show, and by that time classical Hollywood was in decline.
JM: I disagree with you here. After "It Happened One Night" Capra became a selling point in the trades. This is obvious from his biographies. He was first of all sold to the trades and then to the urban audiences in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago. His movies would appear as Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" on the movie marquis. Or watch Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" (1941), where the director is obsessed with making a movie "like Capra" and this was more than just an inside joke.
> > but rather wondering if the individual style was anything more than the
> survival of the best "star" creation network.
>
> But while B actors never made A movies, B directors made A movies.
> Being a star director didn't help -- in fact, it often hurt - witness the
> troubles
> of Sternberg and Stroheim.
>
> >JM: The first step is that the Hollywood director markets his personal
> style to studios and producers, (along with the ability to come in on time
> and under the budget)
>
> Brian: And who is an example of this in Hollywood history?
>
> >JM: the second step is that the "style" is marketed to the public as this
> > "kind"
> of film or that kind of film
>
> Brian: Again, what director had his style marketed this way during the classical
> Hollywood period?
JM: The fact that nobody discusses "mise en scene", etc., in the way that we might today doesn't mean that a "style" was not sold to various audience/consumer sectors.
I get my information from various biographies of directors and from histories of Hollywood. Also as background my ideas come from "The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960", by Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson and "The Genius of the System" by Thomas Schatz.
In effect all Hollywood directors who became "stars" of any kind were marketed this way to the initial audience of the trade magazines and the newspapers and sometimes to the managers of the various movie house owners, when the studio had not already guaranteed distribution.
All one has to do is look at the press releases and the way the initial promotions to the trades and reviewers were written. At the beginning this was an insider/outsider division in marketing. (You market to retailers and advertisement venues differently than you market to individual consumers.) The decision of how much you marketed a film as a Capra film or a Cary Grant film was partially a matter of who you were marketing to. But by the late 30s even this was beginning to change. If the director could be marketed directly to the public he was. Sometimes what was marketed was even the Hollywood bigness of some producers.
But marketing wouldn't matter at all if it was did not in fact motivate, change, feedback on how these movies were made. And again I must emphasize that I think it is empirically true that the "star system", and how it developed in Hollywood, and how it came to be used, had more to do with how movies were made and the distinction of those movies from each to each than anything to do with auteurs, directors, or any individual category of artist.
Jerry Monaco