Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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in this sense that it is possible to speak of a film auteur as an unconscious
catalyst. 58
Wollen argued that this structure consisted of a “master antimony” – the opposition
between difference or singularity and universality in the work – manifested across a
series of binary oppositions. 59 Thus the master antimony in the work of John Ford was
between nature and culture, and this varies according to how it is played out in the
binary oppositions of garden/wilderness, ploughshare/sabre, settler/nomad,
European/Indian, civilised/savage, book/gun, East/West and so on.
Such versions of auteurism are useful for the effort they make to avoid the reduction of
the approach to a personality cult. However, they are premised on the assumption that
discursive or semiotic structures are necessarily the most interesting aspect of film
aesthetics. Such a priority was typical of the halcyon days of structuralism. In dealing
directly with the individuals involved in the production of Ward’s films, I have not
found it necessary or desirable to translate everything in terms of discourse. A more
eclectic, exploratory approach can yield insights not available to the purer and more
specialised structuralist mode of analysis. The so-called “linguistic turn” was valuable
in sharpening up our sense of textuality but it led to excessively specialised approaches
and lost touch with the experiences and complexities of filmmaking processes and film
industry contexts.
The last forty years has seen a continuing series of attacks on auteurism in the name of
post-structuralism (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida) or historical
materialism. In the case of post-structuralism, these have asserted the primacy of
language itself over the user of the language, and the slippery nature of meaning. 60 The
work of historical materialists such as Ed Buscombe and John Ellis has treated the
political, economic and technological contexts of filmmaking as more powerfully
58
Wollen, "From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema: The Auteur Theory," 532.
59
Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, 3rd ed. (London: Secker and Warburg in association
with the British Film Institute, 1972) 96.
60
For Barthes, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination [….] the birth of the reader must
be at the cost of the death of the author” (Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana, 1977) 148.). No less influential were the writings of Michel Foucault, who was
concerned with the effects of the institution on authorship. Like Barthes, Foucault believed that the idea
of the author as God was dead (Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?," Screen 20.1 (1979): 28.).