Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Collaboration
FROM AUTEURS TO AMATEURS
In the late twentieth century, traditional concepts and
practices in the collaborative nature of filmmaking began
to be challenged. On the one hand, the proliferation of
camcorder and digital technologies has taken filmmaking
out of the studio and away from its cadres of artists and
craftspeople, placing the whole endeavor in the hands of
amateurs. As if to fulfill the prophecy of Alexandre
Astruc’s 1946 theoretical formulation of the caméra-stylo,
or ‘‘camera pen,’’ even the most unpracticed among them
can now capture image and sound with mobility and
ease, working in relative solitude, relieved of the need
for sound engineers, camera operators, focus pullers,
editors, special effects technicians, and most of the rest
of the elaborate apparatus of the film studio (Astruc in
Graham). First-time filmmaker Robert Rodriguez
(b. 1968), for example, made El Mariachi (1992) for a
comparative pittance and with minimal dependence on
a technical crew. At first glance, such a film and such
wide-open filmmaking possibilities seem to bear out the
auteur theory, which grew out of Astruc’s pronouncements
and subsequent writings by Bazin in Cahiers du
cinéma in the 1950s, and which was imported to the
United States in the early 1960s by the critic Andrew
Sarris (b. 1928). Over time, the auteurist position that
the director is the prime creative force has been countermanded
by assertions that the true auteur is, variously,
the writer, screenwriter, producer, editor, or cameraman.
All of which proves, ironically, that not just one but all
the participants in the filmmaking process deserve a
measure of responsibility for the final product.
Filmmakers from the Danish movement known as
Dogma 95 have in fact affirmed the primacy not of the
director or any other individual but of the collaborative.
The first Dogma Manifesto, delivered by Lars von Trier
(b. 1956) in 1995, proclaimed that no credit for
‘‘Director’’ would be permitted on their films. Their
movies were the result of partnership and interchange
among cast and crew. The semi-improvised, locationshot
films of the period from 1995 to 2000, including
Festen (The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998),
Mifunes sidste sang (Mifune, Søren Kragh-Jacobson,
1999), Idioterne (The Idiots, Lars von Trier, 1998), and
The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, 2000), stand as testaments
to Dogma’s collective ideals.
After a century of cinema, the Dogma collective
seems to have turned the wheel of film history full circle.
The idea of abolishing the identity of the director hark
back to the days of the silents, when viewers were kept
guessing about the identities of the personnel behind
and on the screen. Viewers of The Great Train Robbery
in 1903, for example, were not told (and perhaps did not
care to know) the identities of its director, players, and
cinematographer. This film became famous for what it
was, not for who was in it or who made it. The idea that
individual authorship should be subordinated to the work
has a long and vibrant history. In Elizabethan theater, as
performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or at London’s
Royal Court Theatre, the play was the thing (according to
no less an authority than Shakespeare). The primacy of the
work itself was also a hallmark of the ensembles of
Stanislavsky and Meyerhold’s Moscow Art Theatre and
of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. Like the theater,
cinema is an arena for both individual and collaborative
genius.
SEE ALSO Acting; Auteur Theory and Authorship; Crew;
Direction; Production Process
FURTHER READING
Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? 2 vols. Edited and translated by
Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The
Classical Hollywood Cinema. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985.
Gomery, Douglas. Movie History: A Survey. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Publishing, 1991.
Graham, Peter, ed. The New Wave. London: Secker and
Warburg, 1968.
Slide, Anthony. The American Film Industry: A Historical
Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
John C. Tibbetts
Jim Welsh
324 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM