Critical Commentary: Recommended Reading [Week 5]

Reading 1:  Lewis, Jon, “The Perfect Money Machine(s): George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Auteurism in the New Hollywood”, Film International vol. 1, no.1 (2003), pp.12-26

By mid-decade, Spielberg's Jaws and Lucas's Star Wars took things to another level (financially at least) while at the same time hinting at another sort of moviemaking that did not require such big concessions to talent. Jaws was the first film to break the $100 million mark. Star Wars nearly doubled the domestic revenues earned byJaws and it exploited ancillary I merchandising tie-ins in ways that no film-even the animated films made at the Disney Studios-had done before it.
p. 66

As Hollywood evolved into a blockbuster industry in the late 1970s, Lucas and Spielberg provided the formula for high-concept entertainment. "If a person can tell me the idea in 25 words or less," Spielberg boasted to J. Hoberman in 1985, "it's going to make a good movie. I like ideas, especially movie ideas, you can hold in your hand."  With such an embrace of simple, striking narratives-narratives that support mass marketability Spielberg displayed a penchant for deliberating upon marketing schemes in advance of principal photography.
p. 68
Quote: Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies andMarketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp.13.

In the new Hollywood, auteurism and celebrity intersect in interesting ways. Auteurs gain notoriety less for a signature style than for a signature product. Lucas's and Spielberg's films are easy to package and multiply in form and format. Their oeuvre presents a model of contemporary filmmaking in an industry that is no longer (just) about making movies. But success is never so simple. Auteurism in the present tense is about celebrity and reputation and how a particular director or producer might use his or her celebrity and reputation to make deals and thus films and money. On that score, Lucas and Spielberg are unrivalled.
p. 68

For historians, auteurism regards the relative quality of an artistic signature. The evaluation of a given oeuvre becomes a matter of posterity and legacy. On that score-in some future account of late-twentieth-century American filmmaking - Lucas and Spielberg may well have plenty to worry about.
p. 69

In a 1996 essay titled "Who Killed the Movies?"David Thomson looks back and laments the end of the auteur renaissance and the emergence in its place of a "medium [that has] sunk beyond anything we dreamed of,leaving us stranded, a race of dreamers. This is more and worse than a bad cycle... and I blame Spielberg and Lucas."Thomson's essay is nostalgic and rueful. "Twenty-five years ago,"he writes, "the best directors were identifiable. They had their own language, the deepest sense of personal style."
p. 69

Special effects have gained prominence at the expense of mise-en-scene, performance (of the human kind), and narrative/thematic depth.The primacy of special effects is never more apparent than it is in two Spielberg-produced films. The first, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Spielberg's protege Robert Zemekis features animated characters with which live-action actors occasionally interfere. The film is at its most interesting in Toon Town where the effects bedevil and overwhelm the flesh and blood on screen.
p. 70

While the first wave auteurs focused primarily on mise-en-scene and took pride and care in directing actors during the production phase, Lucas and Spielberg are almost exclusively post-production directors.
p. 70

If a director or producer's claim to auteur status regards the degree to which he or she has controlled a project, Lucas and Spielberg are auteurs of the highest, strictest order. Such a degree of control was from the start dependent on a similarly high degree of box office success.
Thomson and others are right to downplay Lucas's and Spielberg's commitment to a directoral, auteur cinema. Lucas and Spielberg used their postproduction expertise to establish another sort of auteur project. As much as the old studios-MGM, Warner, etc.-cultivated a signature look in the so-called classical era, Lucasfilm, 1L M,and Spielberg's production unit, Amblin, have produced a recognizable, signature product." Like no other directors before or since, Lucas and Spielberg successfully challenged studio control over postproduction, and they did so in order, as auteurs, to control their products completely. Lucas has gone so far as to exert control over the exhibition of his films through his THx-line of theatre sound systems and videocassette and DVD sound reproduction.
p. 71

Lucas and Spielberg have exploited their auteur celebrity more deftly than did any of their predecessors. Most film historians damn them for this particular skill, or at least insist that we need to put their oeuvres in the context of certain significant changes in the film industry. As the film historian Henry Jenkins writes: "By treating filmmakers as independent contractors, the new production system places particular emphasis on the development of market value of an individual director." 18 This market value is tied to the consistent supply of a familiar, visual, and narrative formula. Directors are wont to develop and consistently adhere to such a recognisable style and form because familiarity breeds success. And success insures control.
p. 71/72

In virtually all of the early interviews, Spielberg espouses a pure joy in filmmaking. But at the same time he discounts the very pretensions that supported 1970S auteurism: personal signature, marginal and/or antagonistic relations with studio Hollywood, a priority on artistic integrity, and a seeming disinterest, though it need not be altogether honest or true, in a film's stake in the marketplace. By embracing high-concept filmmaking, Spielberg expressed (according to his critics at least) undue interest in what works and what doesn't work with audiences. By seeming to prioritise public relations over personal artistic principals, he effectively snubbed the very filmmaking practice that reviewers, critics, and historians had come to idealise.
p. 73/74

As to his own role within 1980s American cinema, Spielberg concluded, again off the cuff. "Francis [Coppola] lives in a world of his own, George [Lucas] lives in a galaxy far, far away but close to human audiences, and I'm an independent moviemaker working within the Hollywood establishment."
Spielberg's deceptively simple remarks here are revelatory.Independence is and always has been an ideal in Hollywood. But while Spielberg's success at the box office has enabled him to maintain control over his movies, the notion that he was ever making films somehow independent of the studios is patently ridiculous.
p. 74
Quote: Chris Auty,"The Complete Spielberg," Sight  and Sound (Autumn 1982): pp. 279.

In Visions of Empire, the film historian Stephen Prince puts the culture commerce dichotomy in Lucas's and Spielberg's oeuvre into a specifically Reaganite context-a context at once reflected in and refracted out from the world of movies and moviemaking,
"Relationships between culture and commerce, film characters, and commodities," writes Prince, "are being reorganised in the era of the blockbuster as an economy of advertising comes to regulate film production and its representations of our cultural life in new ways. Some films become ads, and characters like ET become products." 
p. 76 
Quote: Stephen Prince, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film (New York: Praeger, 1992), pp. 22.

Kolker's book reveals the difficulty of doing auteurist history in the blockbuster era-an era that marks the industrial demise of the auteur. For example, in the third edition Kolker's book reveals the difficulty of doing auteurist history in the blockbuster era-an era that marks the industrial demise of the auteur. For example, in the third edition he adds a section on Spielberg, a director that he tries to like but in the final analysis regards as merely the best director in a particularly bad era"of minimal experimentation and large scale repetition." For Kolker, Spielberg is the avatar of a pervasive "cinema of retrenchment."
p. 78/79 
Quote: Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3rd ed, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 247-248. 

Though Lucas's work has been no less mainstream or commercial than that of Spielberg, Lucas has historically been far less willing than Spielberg to publicly embrace the Hollywood system. Lucas's account of his decision to seek a modicum of autonomy from Hollywood reveals a film student's notion of independence based in large part on the European model championed by the auteur critics and French New Wave filmmakers whose work dominated the film school curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s.
p. 80

It is important to remember that the freedom to make movies "independently" in Hollywood comes at a cost. Lucas and Spielberg found a formula for success with the film-going public. But more significantly,they found a formula for success in their dealings with the studios. In the mid-1970s, when Lucas and Spielberg first hit the scene,auteurs were under significant pressure to turn things around at the box office. And that's exactly what these two auteurs did.
p. 84

The 1970s studios' conglomerate owners, the likes of Transamerica, Coca-Cola, and Gulf and Western, dealt with their studios like any of their subsidiaries as units held accountable to consistent business practices, marketing policies, and bottom-line performance. As the entertainment market expanded in the 1980s,these corporations began to insist that films be distributed in a variety of forms and formats to better exploit the vertically and horizontally integrated marketplace. Lucas and Spielberg were the first and the best at the very sort of filmmaking designed to succeed under such an economic policy. In light of this we might ask here, at the end, had Lucas and Spielberg not arrived on the scene just when they did, would studio executives in 1980s Hollywood have had to invent them? 
p. 84

Week 5 [Seminar Notes] - Authorship in Hollywood

Authorship in Hollywood

Agents who impact the authorship of a motion picture:

- Director

- Screenwriters

- Editors

--------------------------- ^ Above and below the line

- Producers

- Composers

- Actors

- Visual FX supervisor

Motion pictures are collaborative projects with many professional working together.

Authors - Do they have a creative or business impact to the product? 

There are corporate and legal concepts to the author of a motion picture.

Auteurism

A critical position which view the director as the key creative figure and 'author' of the film - drawing on traditional notions of the writer/artist

- Emerged in France in the 50s at Cahiers du Cinema.

- Directors such as Hitchcock and Howard Hawks are seen to have developed a signature style while working within the constraints of the studio system.

- Also closely associated with postwar European art cinema (e.g. Rossellini, Bergman) and was the driving force behind the French New Wave Goddard, Truffaut, et al)

- Auteurist criticism identifies themes and elements of style that recur across a director's body of work.

Auteurism in the US

- The director was not the most important or powerful figure in the studio production process is the classical era (producer-unit system)

- Auteurism popularized in the US by critics such as Andrew Sarris in the 60s

- It became an important part of New Hollywood - often described as the 'Auteurist Renaissance' directors such as Penn, Coppola, Altman, Scorsese are given more creative control in the late 60s/70s

- Studio system declined as the name of the directors became widely associated with their films.

Critiques of Auteurism

- Often, there are many professionals marginalized from the auteur theory. The director is not the only creative voice and misunderstands the nature of studio filmmaking

- Liable to understand films as products of the director's individual 'vision' rather than shaped by broader contexts - industrial, economic, socio-cultural

- Other ways of organising films into groups - e.g. by genre, national cinemas and approaches

- Philosophical critique - Influence of post-structuralism - idea from literary theory in film studies

- Ideas of studio authorship.

Studio Authorship

- Hollywood motion pictures are 'corporate art' (Christensen) and constitute acts of corporate speech - i.e. its the studio that is the primary author of the film

- Studio films are frequent allegories about the corporation and the industry.

Roland Barthes The Death of the Author 1967

Barthes attacks Romantic notion of the author as the originator of meaning.

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single meaning 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

"The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior. Nothing is original."

- Author as a bourgeois ideological construct - the writer does not exist outside of language.

"The birth of a reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author"

Michael Foucault What is an Author 1969

The idea of the author function:

- The author is a construction - but one that nevertheless has a discursive function (authors matter because readers think they matter

Jonathan Grey When is the Author

No text has a single author

- Texts are always in the process of becoming - their meaning is not fixed at the moment of creation/origin - but a continuing process

- Multiple version of the text over time (e.g. several cuts of Blade Runner)

- The role of the audience in creating meaning and changing texts over time.

(Gray and Johnson, A Companion to Media Authorship, 2013)

Timothy Corrigan

- Places auteurs with the context of post-classical Hollywood - i.e. we must still think about the 'auteur' because it is an important part of the ways films are discussed, sold and consumed.

- Idea of the 'auteur' as commercial strategy in the 60s - wanning of the studio system

- The auteur as brand and marketing strategy.

- The auteur as a celebrity star

"In today's commerce we want to know what our authors and auteurs look like and how they act, it is the text and not its author that now may be dead."

- The blockbuster (auteur part of the 'high concept' package) mini Majors and home viewing.

Elsasser The Mind Game

Mind game films cross boundaries between mainstream Hollywood, auteur film and international art cinema.

- Tend to attract a cult following and create a fan base community

Often a main character's mental state is extreme/unstable/pathological. The films plays with character's and audience's perception of reality.

- It's a new form of spectator engagement

- They deal with epistemological problems (how do we know what we know) onto ontological doubts

Cinematic has become more intricate

- Mind game films feature multiple diegesis, unreliable narration, missing shots and POVs which can, in turn, make the audience feel cheated.

- These films make you work for their enjoyment and become a far more inclusive experience for the viewer.

Discipline, Control, Touch and Train?

Walter Benjamin's theory:

"'training the senses' for modernity and urban life, it also provides a bridging argument to an apparently quite different school of thinking about ordering and realigining out somatic responses...."

Stephen Johnson's Theory

Week 5 [Reading Notes] - Authorship in Hollywood

Week 5 - Authorship in Hollywood

Reading 1: Capps, Robert (2010). “Q&A: Christopher Nolan on Dreams, Architecture, and Ambiguity”, http://www.wired.com/2010/11/pl_inception_nolan/

Christopher Nolan, director of Memento, and The Dark Knight, tends to let his twisty genre deconstructions speak for themselves. But he agreed to talk to Wired about the decade-long inception of his movie Inception (on DVD December 7). We talked to him about heists, architecture, and the difference between ambiguity and a lack of answers. Hint: One is better (looking at you, Lost).

Wired: You mix in other genres as well. There’s a bit of noir, and in the snow scene you play with the conventions of James Bond-style action-movies.

Nolan: I’m a lover of movies, so that’s where my brain went. But I think that’s where a lot of people’s minds would go if they were constructing an arena in which to conduct this heist. I also wanted the dreams in Inception to reflect the infinite potential of the human mind. The Bond movies are these globe-trotting spy thrillers, filmmaking on a massive scale. The key noir reference is the character Mal; it was very important to me that she come across as a classic femme fatale. The character and her relationship to Cobb’s psyche is the literal mani-festation of what the femme fatale always meant in film noir—the neurosis of the protagonist, his fear of how little he knows about the woman he’s fallen in love with, that kind of thing.

---------------------------

Wired: As a filmmaker, are you broadly trying to “incept” your audience? Are you trying help them find some form of catharsis through your work?

Nolan: Well, I think that there’s a fairly strong relationship in a lot of ways between what the team is trying to provide for their subject, Fischer, and what we’re trying to do as filmmakers. For me, a key thing is what Cobb says about how positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. I think that’s very true. I also think it’s noteworthy how the team must use symbols to construct an emotional narrative for Fischer. This is extremely similar to the way a filmmaker uses symbols to give an idea to an audience. The use of the pinwheel, for example, in Fischer’s emotional story. It’s a very
cinematic device. A lot of people have related that to Citizen Kane. And that is exactly the point—it’s Rosebud, a visual symbol that sticks in your head from earlier in the story and then can take on new meaning later on. Inceptiondefinitely seems to be a film about itself, the more I talk about it.

----------------------------

Wired: [Laughs.] Right. There’s a line that I think is key to the movie that’s referenced throughout: “Do you want to take a leap of faith?” What is the importance of that?

Nolan: Without getting too wild and woolly about it, the idea is that by the end of the film people will start to realize that the situation is very much like real life. We don’t know what comes next, we don’t know what happens to us after we die. And so the idea of the leap of faith is the leap into the unknowability of where the characters find themselves.

Wired: I’ve seen the line used to support two interpretations. One is that it’s proof that the entire movie is a dream, something reverberating around in Cobb’s subconscious.

Nolan: Mm-hmm.

Wired: And the other is that it indicates that you as the audience member have to take a leap of faith and decide whether the ending of the movie is a dream or not. Would you talk about where on that spectrum you fall?

Nolan: [Laughs.] I don’t think I can talk about that, no. The ambiguity is very much a part of the substance of the film—I’ll put it that way. The film does not specify one way or the other.

---------------------------

Wired: Either way, he has found a reality where he (Cobb) got what he needed. I know that you’re not going to tell me, but I would have guessed that really, because the audience fills in the gaps, you yourself would say, “I don’t have an answer.”

Nolan: Oh no, I’ve got an answer.

Wired: You do?!

Nolan: Oh yeah. I’ve always believed that if you make a film with ambiguity, it needs to be based on a sincere interpretation. If it’s not, then it will contradict itself, or it will be somehow insubstantial and end up making the audience feel cheated. I think the only way to make ambiguity satisfying is to base it on a very solid point of view of what you think is going on, and then allow the ambiguity to come from the inability of the character to know, and the alignment of the audience with that character.

_________________________________________________________

Reading 2: Elsaesser, Thomas (2012) “Auteurism Today: Signature Products, Concept-Authors and Access for All: Avatar”, in The Persistence of Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 281-304.

Lucas and Spielberg are the descendants of Griffith and, even more directly, of Chaplin, who made millions from the movies he starred in: they are artist-businessmen. The type is as old as Hollywood.

- Louis Menand

The Hollywood Auteur in the Digital Age

Since the late 80s, there is a general agreement that one of the founding narratives of the auteur theory no longer has either intelluctual credibility or plausibility in practice.

(p. 281)

The original narrative established the term auteur as:

The proper name for a film director, who under specific circumstances can be acknowledged as the author of a commercially produced film, even if hundreds of other professionals were involved in it's making.

(p. 281)

“Digital” in the phrase “digital cinema” not only means special effects and computer wizardry, but also the oblique and quasi-magical nexus that today ties reality to images, audiences to the cinema, film authors to studios and studios to multi-media corporations, whose workings and interactions once in a while produce spectacular economic or “real world” effects, such as the three billion dollars box-office gross of James Cameron’s Avatar, a figure so staggering that it demands, besides metaphors (of incredulity and black magic) and metonymies (of technical prowess and white magic) perhaps also an attempt at a more rational explanation.

(p. 281)

Social geographer Allen J. Scott states:

- One of the defining features of contemporary society, at least in the high-income countries of the world, is the conspicuous convergence that is occurring between the domain of the economic on the one hand and the domain of the cultural on the other. Vast segments of the modern economy are inscribed with significant cultural content, while culture itself is increasingly being supplied in the form of goods and services produced by private firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange. . . . An especially dramatic case of this peculiar conjunction of culture and economics is presented by the motion picture industry of Hollywood.

(p. 282)

Jon Lewis regards George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg in one of his essays as not just the economically most successful Hollywood directors in the history of the cinema, but as standing for what he terms the second wave of “New Hollywood” auteurs, to be distinguished from the first, of which Coppola and Scorsese are the outstanding representatives. Lewis starts by reminding us that in the early 1970s, these four filmmakers had more in common than separated them. Their passion for the movies as cinephile fans from an early age, their film school background, their immense knowledge of both American and European film history made them a distinct group.

(p. 283)

Scorsese and Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas: Signature Style vs Signature Product

Lucas and Spielberg are directors, producers (and writers), as were some of the classic auteurs of the post-Paramount Decree era, but now they have protégés, who make films similar to those of the masters (Tobe Hooper and Robert Zemeckis in the case of Spielberg), or whom they let direct their films (in the case of Lucas, who has more or less passed on directing since the initial success of the Star Wars series). 

Evidently, these different roles (producer, director, writer) no longer quite mean what they once did even in Hollywood, if they suggest that only by directing can someone be an auteur. Spielberg, with a producer’s or co-producer’s credit for more than 120 films, arguably has been more influential on the development of Hollywood in these roles than he has as a director. As Lewis puts it: “[Lucas and Spielberg’s] oeuvre presents a model of contemporary filmmaking in an industry that is no longer (just) about making movies.” 

(p. 283)

The signature product can be seen as a crucial element on the “service” side, which is where the accent lies when speaking of “total entertainment.” Lewis, elaborating on signature product, points out that:

Lucas and Spielberg’s initial impact at the box office was unprecedented and remains unmatched. It is the ground zero of their importance, an importance that begins and according to their many critics maybe ends with money. Lucas’ breakthrough film, American Graffiti (1973), was until 1999 the highest grossing low budget film in motion picture history. In what was a sign of things to come, the film, picked up reluctantly by Universal only after Francis Coppola signed on as executive producer in 1973, was brilliantly cross-marketed with an LP of its nostalgic pop music score. Spielberg’s Jaws, released two years later, broke the box office record set by The Godfather (1972). Its success created the summer season and in doing so presented a model of filmmaking for a generation of “summer films.” In 1977, Lucas’ Star Wars broke Jaws’ record and did so in dramatic fashion. Like American Graffiti, Star Wars was a model new Hollywood product. It was easily cross-promoted and it exploited markets in several parallel entertainment and consumer industries. Given the scale of its financial success, questions regarding its artistic merit seemed altogether beside the point. 

(p. 283/4)

From Production to Post-Production

The reasons why the shift from “signature style”—already a self-conscious, postmodern or “reflexive” turn on the old auteur principles of style and mise-en-scène—to “signature product” is so important are multiple and symptomatic. 

1) Hollywood, since the 1980s, has faced a distinctly different media landscape: an increase in competitors, made up of rival media and new, so-called “disruptive” technologies, which in turn presented challenges to all aspects of Hollywood’s business model as well as to the manufacture and identity of its core product, the feature film. The proliferation of reception contexts and media platforms, as well as modes of production that Hollywood has embraced (event movies, family entertainment, animation films, indie films and even niche market art films), makes relevant and indeed requires a new concept of the “author,” as expressed in and through the signature product, rather than merely through a signature style.

(p. 284)

2) There's more and more time and money being spent on post-production processes such as editing, special effects (even for non-fantasy subjects), as well as on sound design and sound effects. Most, if not all of this work is done digitally, partly for cost reasons but also because of the extended possibilities that digital technology affords in the manipulation of image and sound, the look and the feel of a picture. Post-production is often “outsourced” to specialized companies, involving a good deal of painstaking manual work, done by armies of trained experts—far away from, say, the locations, the sets and the actors of the film-in-progress.

(p. 284)

It is sometimes assumed that George Lucas abandoned directing and retreated to post-production out of an adolescent, nerdy desire to play with cool toys, undisturbed by “reality” and insulated from the demands of human interaction, as if Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company he founded, was some expensive trainset he could afford with the money he made with Star Wars.

(p. 285)

Lucas and Spielberg’s focus on post-production has proved to be a practical and successful industry strategy. Historically, it has been the phase of filmmaking during which the battle to control a movie has been keenest. . . . Lucas and Spielberg understood that in such a system films are made and sometimes unmade once the talent and crew go home. In order to protect the final cut of their films, they have technically complicated the post-production process. Their films are shot in such a way that no one else could ever hope to make sense of the footage except them. Footage, after all, functions primarily to set-up complex post-production effects—effects that depend on their particular expertise. If a director or producer’s claim to auteur status regards the degree to which he or she has controlled a project, Lucas and Spielberg are auteurs of the strictest and highest order. . . . Like no other directors have before or since, Lucas and Spielberg successfully challenged studio control over post-production. They have done so in order, as auteurs, to control their products completely. Lucas has gone so far as to exert control over the exhibition of his films through his THX-line of theater sound systems and videocassette, laserdisk and DVD sound reproduction.

(p. 285)

The Concept Author

On the big screen, a film has to provide a new experience (it has to be an event, a phenomenon), whose power resides in the immediate sensory effect or physical impact: effects difficult to obtain or retain on the small screen and in the DVD format. Since the DVD of a blockbuster is often purchased because the film is already known as an event, it must contain elements, details or materials not present or not perceived when first experienced in projection, enhancing the pleasure of the initial experience, rather than merely allowing the viewer to re-live it. DVDs are enriched with a “bonus package” which contains material extraneous to the projected film—the director’s running commentary, out-takes and cut scenes, a “making-of” documentary, interviews with stars and other leading personalities—the DVD seriously challenges the coherence and closure of the film as a self-sufficient work.

(p. 286)

  

--> As a consequence, the director not only creates the work, s/he also has to craft a public persona, an image of the director as the principle of coherence that keeps creativity and motivation intact, while nonetheless being open to the culture at large, accessible to the audiences, also in the new Internet mode of “joining the conversation”: authors must master the dynamics that play in popular culture and mass- entertainment, without becoming a pure product of marketing and personality cult. 

(p. 286)

The new auteur could either be thought of in military terms, as a commanding officer or general, or in the way a conceptual artist shifts mental registers, categories and levels of perception and awareness, while appearing to leave the object unaltered—the aesthetic equivalent of a disruptive technology. The first would bring us back to the disciplinary regime, the second is closer to the control societies. Calling the contemporary Hollywood auteur a “concept author” therefore wants to draw attention both to the mode of production as “high concept,” and to the resulting narrative as (in concept, if not in actuality) a brand or franchise. The objective conditions for such concept-narratives, however, may be external even to those who devise and implement them, depending on any number of historical or contingent elements present at a particular point in time. Hence Jon Lewis is right to conclude his essay with the more than rhetorical question: “Might we ask here at the end, had Lucas and Spielberg not arrived on the scene just when they did, would executives in eighties’ Hollywood have had to invent them?”.

(p. 288)

Welles’ “virtuosity” symbolized the artist’s ultimate challenge (as response) to the power of the mogul and the tycoon, and thus, the most perfect embodiment of the auteur in the classical sense, the concept-auteur in the Spielberg mold finds his challenge in either harnessing the external energies of the blockbuster as new medium (“changes of scale, pace and pattern,” “the numbers”), or he re-appropriates the priorities of the system by “personalizing” them, and in this personalized form, “responds” to the public. 

(p. 288)

James Cameron and AVATAR

James Cameron is a Canadian by birth but his family moved to Southern California in 1971 when he was 17. It was Lucas’ Star Wars in 1977 that persuaded him to enter the film business, where he found his first assignments at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, making miniature models. However, unlike Coppola, Scorsese or Lucas, Cameron is largely an autodidact, never having officially enrolled in any of the New York or Los Angeles university-based film schools.

(p. 289)

Working his way through the ranks of B-movies as a Corman protégé, he eventually got his break in 1984 through Orion Pictures, Warners Bros. and United Artists’ boutique indie company. Orion part-financed and distributed The Terminator (1984), directed and scripted by Cameron, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role. The film proved to be a mega-hit, creating a brand, and setting new standards for action pictures, time-travel science fiction, as well as special morphing effects, shape-shifting the human body. 

(p. 289)

Cameron is the embodiment of the post-auteur author, following in the footsteps of Spielberg and Lucas, but with the two most economically successful films in cinema history to his name, no mere acolyte either. This post-auteur authorship of the concept-author can usefully be discussed in the case of Cameron under several headings: auto-representation and personalized narrative, affective engagement with diverse publics, ambition to effect through technology a change of paradigm

(p. 290)  

Keeping Control, Maintaining Access for All

The director and the institution have control over the spectrum of reception. In order for  them to create a successful product, the feature film must have "mastery over the multiple-entry points" such as the ones already named: that a film must make sense to audiences of different gender, different age-groups, different national identities and different ethnic as well as educational backgrounds. But a film also quite literally must work for spectators who “enter” a film at different times during a given performance (e.g. when shown on television) or at different points in history (the permanent repeats of Hollywood classics on network and cable television being a kind of test: classics disclose themselves differently to every new generation).

(p. 291)  

“Access for all” in Avatar thus functions at the level of the code, ensuring multiple readings, while not predicating or privileging any one in particular. “Access for all” in the internet era has become a complex, multi-level, multi-cultural process of mediation and appropriation, which presupposes in the fabric of the film’s political and emotional texture not only a planned degree of pluralism of signs, regarding the story, its ideology and affective registers, but a new way of encoding them. Cameron has, I believe, added to the “textually coherent ambiguity” of classical Hollywood another level, which I shall provisionally call the level of “cognitive dissonance,” heading towards conceptual “double-binds.”

(p. 293)  

Anti-Americanism is an instrument in Hollywood’s arsenal for maintaining its dominance in the world market and thus another example of the paradoxical consequence of exercising power and keeping control under conditions of what Deleuze called “modulation”: by giving its ideological “enemies”—who are also its customers—a “voice” and a “stake,” the Cameron blockbuster does indeed restore “perfect balance” to an asymmetrical system, though perhaps not quite in the way Distelmeyer meant it, yet very much in the sense that it is a sign of another level of (self-)reflexivity, where the film invites one to read it as an allegory of its own conditions of possibility.

(p. 295)  

Keeping Control Through Performed Self-Presentation

"Access for all” is a strategy that combines opening up with the need of keeping control. Yet how does this double priority also manifest itself for the director as an author in the blockbuster environment? There is the power the author has through the director’s interview to shape his self-presentation through controlling the personal narrative. As we saw in the case of Coppola and Spielberg, directors have taken an active role in presenting themselves, even before the DVD bonus package along with general media interest in almost any form of celebrity allowed for more targeted interventions in the director’s projected self-image.

(p. 295)  

The core of the Cameron narrative is that of “the curious boy” who, from his early years on, was as drawn to biological fieldwork and scientific experiments as he spent hours drawing pictures and doodling during maths lessons at school. Cameron establishes a clear link between science and the arts as his twin motivations: a biologist and techno-geek with an irrepressible artistic imagination, he thinks of himself as much a documentary filmmaker as he is a storyteller, even though “documentary” here clearly does not mean “realism,” but more the probing, exploring mind of the scientist. 

(p. 295/6) 

Much of this personal narrative provides a perfect foil for Avatar. Cameron can draw on excellent credentials for the pro-environmental bias of the film. His interest in biology and forests, as well as his passion for diving, snorkelling and underwater exploration sends out an eco-friendly message of someone whose pursuits and hobbies do not hurt or exploit anybody, and are respectful of nature’s beauties as well as her mysteries. It echoes the enthusiasm of biologists for the film, while also making the new age mystical pantheism of Pandora and its Na’vi people seem both less naïve and less calculating.

(p. 295/6)  

"True Lies"; Keeping Control via the Narrative's Self-Contradiction

A look at the narrative construction of Avatar can locate there some of the contradictions or cognitive switches that give the film its “life.” The Hollywood of complex narratives, but also of franchise movies has refined and perfected a mode of story-telling that can positively accommodate radical switches of story premises in its fictional worlds, when one thinks of films like:

- The Sixth Sense

- The Usual Suspects 

- Vanilla Sky 

- A Beautiful Mind

- Donnie Darko  

- Lost Highway

- Mulholland Drive

- Existenz

- Spider

- Inception

 In all of these cases, spectators are given to believe in one sort of reality, only to be obliged to revise their assumptions or suspend them altogether: about whether the protagonist is alive or dead, whether we see the world through a demented or distorting subjective consciousness, whether we are in a dream, or indeed in someone else’s dream, whether the film begins at the beginning or we are somewhere in the middle which we mistake as the beginning. For such narratives, the geometrical term of the Moebius strip has been revived, to indicate the coexistence or continuity of one “side” of the story with its opposite, that is, the premise along with its reversal, each necessitating the other and each depending on the other. 

(p. 297)  

Unobtainium

In order to get from one realm to the other, the film posits a link, whereby the conclusion becomes its own premise, each pulling up the other by its bootstraps, so to speak, and thereby making it real, or at least making it a support of “reality.”

The flip or switch operated between technology and nature or between the idealized real and the real real is not something that the film tries to hide or disguise. On the contrary, in the form of a Hitchcock MacGuffin, it is exposed and underscored: Avatar’s MacGuffin is what the Corporation’s semi-military expedition force purportedly travels to Pandora for: obtaining the most precious of rare minerals, called “unobtainium.” It is difficult to think of a better way of “hiding in the light,” that is, of Cameron advertising his own version of “true lies”—a plausible impossibility.

(p. 298)  

Strip-Mining or Data-Mining

For each side acts like—and indeed, are—“miners”: one strip-mines the land of the Na’vi, in order to obtain unobtainium, the other data-mines the flora, fauna, the culture, the religion and the minds of the Na’vi. In other words, a parasite-host relationship can be said to exist not just between Earth and Pandora, but also between the evil corporation and the good scientists:

what binds them together is a symbiotic relationship of antagonistic mutuality, united by an ideology of acquisition and appropriation. The action thus dramatizes conflict, competition and antagonism, while the film at the symbolic level draws parallels between the imperialism of the Sigourney Weaver character (who wants to learn and know) and that of the Corporate Yuppie (who wants to grab and seize). 

(p. 298/9)  

From Cognitive Dissonance to Double Bind: Empowering the Audience 

The issue of control, crucial to the author’s identity as auteur, can manifest itself in “independent” productions as much as in block- busters through switches in the reality-status and fictional world premises of the narrative. Cameron’s Avatar does this in more muted but also more systematic ways than other films mentioned. While not every spectator may be aware of, or be troubled by them, the cumulative effect of these cognitive dissonances is to provoke the spectator into actively producing his or her own reading, in order to disambiguate the “mixed messages” or to untie the knot of the double bind, if we grant that such shifts of register are comparable to double binds, in the sense that they are as difficult to respond to as they are to resist.

(p. 300)  

Double binds are classic ways of exercising control without coercion, usually effected by enlisting the “victim’s” own active cooperation. If the undecidability of a film’s premise motivates the spectator cognitively, it would explain these “strong readings” that Avatar has given rise to: since the message is fundamentally self-contradictory, unraveling its meaning results in a higher “ontological commitment” on the part of the viewer to his or her particular interpretation—a commitment that works in favor of the affective bond formed with a given film. One could even say that a double bind situation gives the illusion of “empowering” the spectator, an impression confirmed by the film’s reception history.

(p. 300)  

The Na’vi are the audiences, tuned in and turned on to Hollywood, so that the enthusiastic response to Avatar as a mirror for self-recognition all over the globe was correct: spectators are the Na’vi, because, at the allegorical level, the Na’vi are spectators in their newly “empowered” role as assigned to them in the Hollywood blockbuster equa- tion. For while audiences, thanks to the technology of digital 3-D, motion and performance capture and new ways of rendering sound and space, participate in the movie in hitherto unheard of sensory proximity, the industry is after something else. As far as Hollywood is concerned, it wants audiences to interact with images, while Hollywood itself acts with the images. 

(p. 300)  

The Concept Author: From Shape Shifter to Paradigm Shifter

Special effects by their nature involve double binds at the perceptual level, since they encourage us to believe with our eyes what our minds know to be impossible. We know that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park cannot be real, yet their density of specification in all perceptually and experientially relevant ways obliges us to accept their existence. Digital 3-D only intensifies this challenge to our mind and senses, since stereoscopic vision is both a simulation and a dissimulation technology. We see two-dimensional images in three dimensions, because the eyes, receiving mixed visual messages, pass them on to the brain, which disambiguates the optical signals by translating them into the coordinates of spatial information, using the best default values that make sense of the input.  

(p. 301)  

Cameron, along with Jeffrey Katzenberg, is one of Hollywood’s most ardent advocates of 3-D. Yet rather than treating it merely as another special effect, made possible by digitization, 3-D for both Katzenberg and Cameron (as well as Spielberg, Zemeckis, Tim Burton and others) has become the platform or the means by which “much more pervasive” (Cameron’s words) changes are being proposed and implemented. Some of these changes have to do with introducing 3-D not just on the big screen, but for television sets, laptops and mobile devices, where 3-D images can be simulated without users having to wear special glasses or otherwise adjust their viewing habits.

(p. 301)  

A major Hollywood film such as Avatar fulfils only one of its functions when successful as narrative and experience; even any associated merchandising and franchising does not exhaust its meaning, if one considers its potential role, as argued here, in re-setting the default values and enforcing a new normativity of assisted sight, thus helping to bring about a paradigm change in the field of vision and the image.  

(p. 303)  

As a Hollywood concept author Cameron has made films that have been instrumental in transforming the way blockbuster movies are being conceived and received, most notably with Avatar. If it does help to establish digital 3-D as the new norm—not only of blockbuster picture making, but also of how we think about the “image” in general—Avatar would indeed illustrate the principle of the shock-doctrine in the entertainment world. It would be, as the phrase has it, a “game changer,” which is to say, it would have all manner of implications for other parts of the industry and how it functions both locally and globally. But then again, it might not, and remain, despite its monster profits, a mere flash in the pan, as many are predicting about the “3-D revolution.”

(p. 303)  

________________________________________________________

Reading 3: Corrigan, Timothy (1998) “Auteurs and the New Hollywood”, in Jon Lewis (ed.). The New American Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 38-63.

As soon as you become big, you get absorbed.
Francis Ford-Coppola

Auteurism - Films that are made with an artistic style/expression of a director.

Quentin Tarantino

- Tarantino is in many ways the quintessential 1990s American auteur.
- His stunning debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992), was considered by reviewers (and his legions of fans) to be no less than a reworking of the language of contemporary film. Pulp Fiction (1994), his following feature, succeeded in rearticulating the figures of violence, communication, and the ethics of (mostly male) relationship laid out in Reservoir Dogs.
- Offscreen, Tarantino plays the same dangerous game with identity politics. He works with Miramax Films to spot, pro- mote, and distribute marginal films.' directs for both television (where he shot an episode of ER, the TV show rated number one in 1997. He also has appeared in acting roles and cameos and in the mid-nineties was the subject of three biographies.

- In a brief span, Tarantino has become, from one point of view, a confrontational individual succeeding in Hollywood despite an uncompromising trash-art vision, and, from another, a show- man quickly cashing in on an image that may be gone tomorrow. 

(p. 39)
_______________________________________________

Auteurism has been bound up with changes in industrial desires, technological opportunities, and marketing strategies. In the United States, for instance, the industrial utility of auteurism from the late 1960s to the early 1970s had much to do with the waning of the American studio system and the subsequent need to find new ways to mark a movie other than with a studio's signature.

(p. 40) 

Since the 1970s especially, the auteurist marketing of movies whose titles often proclaim the filmmaker's name, such as Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1981) or Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), aim to guarantee a relationship between audience and movie whereby an intentional and authorial agency governs, as a kind of brand-name vision whose aesthetic meanings and values have already been determined.
(p. 40)   

David Bordwell's analysis of Auteurism
The overt self-consciousness of the narration is often paralleled by an extratextual emphasis on the filmmaker as a source. Within the art cinema's mode of production and reception, the concept of the author has a formal function it did not possess in the Hollywood studio system. Film journalism and criticism promote authors. as do film festivals, retrospectives, and academic film study. Directors' statements of intent guide comprehension of the film, while a body of work linked by an authorial signature encourages viewers to read each film as a chapter of an oeuvre . . . . More broadly, the author becomes the real-world parallel to the narrational presence who communicates (what is the filmmaker saying?) and who expresses (what is the author's personal vision?).

Auteurs: From Author to Agent

Despite their large differences, theories and practices of auteurism from Alexandre Astruc and Peter Wollen to Michel Foucault and Stephen Heath, from John Ford to Jean-Luc Godard, share basic assumptions about the auteur as the voice or presence that accounts for how a film is organized. 
(p. 41)   

To view a film as the product of an auteur means to read it or respond to it as an expressive organization that precedes and forecloses the historical fragmentations and subjective distortions that can take over the reception of even the most classically coded movie. 

(p. 41)   

Seen as a cultural agent, the auteur must now be described according to the conditions of a cultural and commercial intersubjectivity, a social interaction distinct from an intentional causality or textual transcendence. 
(p. 42)

In the cinema, auteurism as agency thus becomes a place for encountering not so much a transcending expression but the different conditions through which expressive meaning is made by an auteur and reconstructed by an audience, conditions that involve historical and cultural motivations and rationalizations. Here, even exasperating auteurs like Tarantino may strategically embrace the even more promising possibilities of the auteur as a commercial presence, since the commercial status of that presence now necessarily becomes part of an agency that culturally and socially monitors identification and critical reception.
(p. 42)


Celebrity Auteurs and the Business of Movies
The practice of the auteur as a particular brand of social agency appears most clearly and most ironically in the contemporary status of the auteur as a celebrity. This idea of the auteur-star vaguely harks back to earlier versions of auteurism that ranked directors, from Orson Welles to Robert Bresson, in aesthetic and intellectual pantheons fitting the distinctions of their films. Today, however, American auteurs are, often and largely, defined by their commercial status and their ability to promote a film, sometimes regardless of its distinction.

 (p. 43)

United Artists signed Michael Cimino to the Heaven's Gate (1980) deal for a $7.8 million projected cost and gave him almost unprecedented directorial freedom. They anointed him as an auteur-artist: part epic genius and part promotional commodity. Perhaps because he was, paradoxically, a relatively unknown quantity with a background, significantly, in advertising. Cimino became the conglomerate image of the blockbuster auteur solely on the basis of the massive potential of his Vietnam film. The Deer Hunter (1978)- which many of the studio executives had not yet seen.

(p. 44)

According to Corrigan, there are historical and cultural contours and how they shape the contemporary auteur, I plan to use the example of Cimino to identify three related shifts in current film culture: 
(I) the blockbuster productions of the conglomerate studios
(2) the alternative films of Hollywood's mini-majors (like Orion)
(3) the importance ofVCR technology in sustaining both kinds of moviemaking.
(p. 45)

According to the revised logic of Hollywood economics, a movie attracts audiences through the excess of its investment in capital and technology; even a high-priced auteur, manufactured or real, might be justified and recuperated by an enormous payback. In the late 1970s, the conglomerates had every reason to be encouraged. The value of George Lucas's Star Wars, for example, could be understood empirically. Some $27million was invested in 1977 ($11 million of it in the shooting budget), and well over $500 million in revenues were generated by 1980 - a 1,855 percent profit in three years.

 (p. 47)

The studios transformed the fundamental nature of the film product by forcing massive alterations in the relation of a film to an audience, since to return those massive investments meant appealing to and aiming at not just the largest possible audience (the more modest strategy of classical films or the alternative art-house audiences of early auteur film culture) but all audiences.
(p. 47)

Contemporary movie culture thus necessarily aligns itself with advertising, not only as a method to abate costs (by advertising other people's products on the screen: cars, soft drinks, and so on), but because blockbuster movies can themselves succeed only as an advertisement of a product that, in appealing to everyone, can never possibly satisfy an audience of different individuals.
(p. 48)

one of the most effective and common high-concept strategies today is the use of the name of the deserving or undeserving director/ auteur as a foregrounded and often bombastic piece of advertisement. Not surprisingly, three of Hollywood's most successful auteurs in the seventies and eighties were Michael Cimino, Adrian Lyne, and Ridley Scott, all with backgrounds in the advertising business.
(p. 48)

In our new film/video culture, auteurs have been recuperated as promotional stars, the process is fairly indiscriminate. Placed before, after, and outside a film, and in effect usurping the work of that film and its reception, today's auteurs-from Spielberg to Tarantino-are agents who, whether they wish it or not, are always on the verge of being self consumed by their status as stars.
(p. 50)

Meaghan Morris has noted (in language similar to Richard Dyer's description of on-screen stars) that today "the primary modes of film and auteur packaging are advertising, review-snippeting, trailers, magazine profiles-always already in appropriation as the precondition, and not the postproduction of meaning."
(p. 50)

If auteurism can be used to promote a movie, filmmakers now run the commerce of the auteurist and autonomous self up against its textual expression in a way that shatters the coherence of both authorial expression and stardom. Motivations, desires, and historical developments which are frequently dramatised in critical readings of films as at least semi- autobiographical - now become destabilised and usually with a purpose.
(p. 51)

The Economics of Self-Sacrifice: Francis Coppola as American Auteur
Straddling the margins of European art cinema and the centre of commercial Hollywood, Francis Ford-Coppola is one of the original directors of the contemporary blockbuster, The Godfather (1972), and the one whose experimental goals seem most threatened by the financial and commercial exigencies of his blockbuster successes. 

Jon Lewis explains that as "far back as 1968, four years before The Godfather made him the best-known director in America, Coppola predicted that his generation of film school-educated auteurs would someday trigger significant change in the movie business "; yet, with the needed special emphasis on finances in Coppola's version of this paradox:

"the dazzling box office success of expensive auteurist movies like The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars - the very sort of movies Coppola had once believed would foster a new American auteur industry-led to an industrywide focus on blockbuster box office revenues. Th e success of auteur films in the 1970s did not, as Coppola had hoped it would, give auteur directors increased access to film financing. Instead, directors became increasingly dependent on studio financing to produce and distribute such "big" films."
(p. 53)

In regards to Coppola's first appearance as the auteur-creator of The Godfather. "It is curious," Jeffrey Chown writes, "that the film that put Coppola on the celebrity map, that gave him the magic adjective 'bankable,' is also extremely problematic in terms of authorship.... Coppola coordinated diverse creative agents in this production, he was clearly the catalyst for the film's success, but, in a career view, his creative control and originality are far less than in other films that bear his directorial signature".
"The name Francis Ford Coppola connotes spectacles, Hollywood entertainment combined with artistic sensibility, Italian weddings, and napalm in the morning. Coppola the individual seems stifled by those expectations."
(p. 54)

In 1975, Coppola summed up his perspective on auteurism:
The auteur theory is fine, but to exercise it you have to qualify, and the only way you can qualify is by having earned the right to have control, by having turned out a series of really incredibly good films. Some men have it and some men don't. I don't feel that one or two beautiful films entitle anyone to that much control. A lot of very promising directors have been destroyed by it. It's a big dilemma, of course, because, unfortunately, the authority these days is almost always shared with people who have no business being producers and studio executives. With one or two exceptions, there's no one running the studios who's qualified, either, so you have a vacuum, and the director has to fill it.
(p. 55)

In the end, Coppola within the commerce of auteurism remains a most utopian figure, for whom the spectacle of self-destruction becomes a way back to self-expression. For him, the destruction of the authority of the auteur can mean the resurrection of a world of private auteurs, an intimate yet expansive network of electronic communication. Speculating on the future of new technologies that regenerate themselves through money made and money spent on them, he proclaims a home-video exchange that somehow retains the aura of auteurist agency, the expressive"1" becoming a third-person plural: "Everybody will use it, everybody will make films, everybody will make dreams. That's what I think is gonna happen. You'll ship 'em over to your friend, and he'll ship one back. ... I think that, very shortly, there's going to be a whole new approach to things, and the designers and the architects and philosophers and artists are going to be the ones to help lead the society;"
(p. 58)


The Age and the Aging Auteurs
There are many kinds ofauteurs in contemporary film culture. And there are many strategies through which a moviemaker can employ the agency of auteurism and by which audiences can use it as a way of understanding films. One common characteristic of new American auteurs like Tarantino or David Lynch is the instantaneity of their careers. The brief duration of auteur celebrity these days parallels the rapid turnover of post-modern consumerism. Without being nostalgic, I would at least like to follow Andrew and urge this notion of duration as the missing element in the account of the modem American auteur.
(p. 59)

In whatever shape and in whatever agency, then, auteurs are far from dead. In fact, they may be more alive than at any other point in film history. This particular interpretive category has of course never addressed audiences in simple or singular ways. Yet, within the commerce of contemporary culture, auteurism has become, as both a production and interpretive position, something quite different from what it may have been in the 1950s or 1960s. Since the early 1970s, the commercial conditioning of this figure has successfully evacuated most of its expressive power and textual coherency; simultaneously, this commercial conditioning has called renewed attention to the layered pressures of auteurism as an agency that establishes different modes of identification with its audiences. However vast some of their differences as filmmakers may be, they each, it seems to me, willingly or not, have had to give up their authority as authors and begin to communicate as figures within the commerce of that image. For viewers, this should mean the pleasure of engaging and adopting one more image of, in, and around a movie without, perhaps, the pretenses of its traditional authorities and mystifications.
(p. 60)

_________________________________________________________

Reading 4: Fisher, Mark (2011) “The Lost Unconscious: Delusions and Dreams in Inception”. Film Quarterly, Vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 37-45.

In Nolan’s worlds, it’s not only that we deceive ourselves; it’s also that we’re deceived about even having an authentic self. There’s no separating identity from fiction. In Memento, Lenny literally writes (on) himself, but the very fact that he can write a script for future versions of himself to read is a horrifying demonstration of his lack of any coherent identity—a revelation that his Sisyphian quest both exemplifies and is in flight from. Inception leaves us with the possibility that Cobb’s quest and apparent rediscovery of his children could be a version of the same kind of loop: a purgatory to Memento’s inferno.
(p. 39)