Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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springs to mind.) There is also the problem of collaboration. According to Stephen
Prince:
There is no effective way for auteurist criticism to deal with the problems posed
by collaboration. The auteur critic detects consistent patterns across the body of
a director’s films and hopes that those things attributed to the director are,
indeed, justified. In most cases, though, the critic attributes things on faith,
without documentation in the form of interviews or written records about who
on the crew did what. 52
I have sought to avoid the problems in this thesis by interviewing Ward’s collaborators
and by accessing all available records.
While there are weaknesses inherent in auteur theory, one of the strengths of the theory
is that it prevents films being discussed in isolation. As Renoir once remarked, a
director really only makes one film and keeps remaking it, thus the recurrent themes,
images and style give the director’s films “a rich unity”. 53 This being the case, when
critiquing a film it is useful to have acquired knowledge about other films by the same
director. In addition, auteur theory allows for the possibility of studying how the
director’s work has developed over time. Another strength of this approach is that it
promotes a study of film style, in that auteurs are recognised as such by their mastery of
the medium. For this reason, the critics of both Cahiers and Movie began “to
concentrate on the mise-en-scène, which, lying between the script and the cutting room,
is the characteristic domain of directorial choice […]. By taking a script written by
someone else and by imposing his directorial style, an auteur makes the film its own,
they argued”. 54 This approach to mise-en-scène underlies the textual studies undertaken
in this thesis. From my point of view, however, a strength of auteur theory is its
tendency to discourage a narrowly textual approach to films. While there are pure
forms of auteurism that seek to limit discussion to tangible textual characteristics, the
theory tends to reach out constantly to at least some other factors – such as the vision or
personality of the director, or broad concepts such as “style” or “interior meaning”. At
the same time, there has been an ongoing debate about the definition of these less
52
Stephen Prince, Movies and Meaning, 2nd ed. (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1997) 396.
53
Thompson and Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction 494.
54
Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988) 107.