Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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determining than the individual director. 61 This work has also been a useful extension
of debate, but while bringing new contexts into play, it has tended to exclude the
important context of directing. Despite these attacks, auteurism has persisted in various
forms. It has survived through its use value. Critics can not afford to abandon it,
thought they are now more inclined to use it as a kind of exploratory hypothesis, or as
one aspect of an eclectic approach that gives equal attention to discourse, intellectual
history, technology and other material aspects. Caughie contends that auteurism today
is “a critical, rather than a theoretical practice, fully accommodated within established
aesthetics, less concerned, in its security, to defend itself or rationalise itself. Within
film criticism, in fact, from being a dislocation, it has become the tradition”. 62
Auteurism has remained closely linked to art cinema, since: “Within the art cinema’s
mode of production and reception, the concept of the author has a formal function it did
not have in the Hollywood studio system”. 63 Art cinema uses the notion of authorship
to unify the film’s text, and to organise it for the audience’s comprehension in the
absence of identifiable stars and genres. Art cinema audiences are addressed as
knowledgeable cinemagoers who will recognise the characteristic style of the author’s
work. The art film is intended to be read as the work of an expressive individual and a
small industry is devoted to informing viewers of authorial marks: career retrospectives,
press reviews, interviews and so on, to introduce viewers to authorial codes. 64 While it
could be argued that art cinema as such has declined in recent years, and the distinctions
between art and commercial cinema have become increasingly blurred, the marketing
approach taken by film festival organisers, for example, has remained essentially
auteurist. A sceptical or cynical approach to Ward’s work would stress the
development of his name as a saleable “brand” in this context.
The importance of auteurism to the discourse of contemporary film culture is discussed
in Timothy Corrigan’s recent essay “Auteurs and the New Hollywood” and his book, A
61 Buscombe argued that in view of the limitations of auteur theory, what was now needed was “a theory
of the cinema that locates directors in a total situation, rather than one which assumes that their
development has only an internal dynamic”. (Buscombe, "Ideas of Authorship," 84.) Ellis proposed that
films are the product of the existing technology of cinema, the organization of production itself, and the
aesthetic of those controlling production. His 1975 study of films made at the Ealing studios exposed a
system of constraints operating on the filmmaker that conventional auteur theory did not take account of.
(John Ellis, "Made in Ealing," Screen 16.1 (1975).)
62 Caughie, ed., Theories of Authorship: A Reader 15.
63 Timothy Corrigan, "Auteurs and the New Hollywood," The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 1998) 41.
64 Cook, ed., The Cinema Book: A Complete Guide to Understanding the Movies 116.