Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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tangible categories, particularly under pressure from structuralist and post-structuralist
critics.
Later critics claimed that: “by ‘Hitchcock’, they mean not the private individual, but
rather the body of films with their unified themes and visual designs. Accordingly,
‘Hitchcock’ becomes a construction required by theory, referring to the films and not to
the man”. 55 This approach was the result of a combination of auteur theory and classic
structuralism, based on the theories of Levi-Strauss. Thus: “Instead of the personal
vision of the creative artist, the new methodology would reveal in any given oeuvre an
objective structure that generated its characteristic meanings, patterns and intensities”. 56
A leading advocate of this kind of ‘scientific’ approach was Peter Wollen, who
contended that:
Of course the director does not have full control over his work; this explains
why the auteur theory involves a kind of decipherment, decryptment. A great
many features of films analysed have to dismissed as indecipherable because of
‘noise’ from the producer, the cameraman, or even the actors […]. What the
auteur theory does is to take a group of films – the work of one director – and
analyse their structure. 57
Wollen’s ideas differed from classic auteur theory, however, in his belief that:
The structure is associated with a single director or individual, not because he
has played the role of artist, expressing himself or his own vision in the film, but
because it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious,
unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the
individual involved […]. There can be no doubt that the presence of a structure
in the text can often be connected with the presence of a director on the set, but
the situation in the cinema, where the director’s primary task is often one of
coordination and rationalisation, is very different from that in the other arts,
where there is a much more direct relationship between the artist and work. It is
55 Prince, Movies and Meaning 396.
56 Lapsley and Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction 109.
57 Wollen, "From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema: The Auteur Theory," 530.