Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
>>
> >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.
Indeed, this is where the whole 200-year struggle to distinguish "art" from "non-art" collapses. If one must keep to such a hollow category as "auteur," then one must be prepared to demonstrate the presence of an "auteur" both in [take your pick of your favorite films] and the most recent TV commericial for MacDonalds. Either they are both "works of art," products of an "auteur," or neither is. Art is craft. Bad or good, interesting or dull, whatever is a product of human (individual or collective) skill is a work of art.
Incidentally, The Waste Land is a wonderful test for those who believe in the sanctity of the auteur. It is incorrect to call either Eliot or Pound the author of it -- and since some of the key lines in it are by Vivienne Eliot, one has to grant it at least three authors to make any sense of it. Even where one 'mind' makes the final decisions of what goes in and what goes out (as with a director supervising the cutting editor) if parts of it could _only_ have been created by others, and could not exist without the independent action of others, then there is just no way that one can usefully see it as the "expression" of the "genius" of one mind. I don't remember the name of the actor now, but the big man who appeared in many of Chaplin's films, including The Gold Rush, contributed something to the essence of those films, even though Chaplin directed and had the core role. Another actor would have created a different film.
Both what Brian writes and some other film criticism I have read give me the sneaking suspicion that discussion of mise en scene has much more to do with the (alleged) soul of the director than with the film itself as a finished product.
Carrol