Discourses of Cinematic Culture and the Hollywood Director: The Development of Christopher Nolan’s Auteur Persona Erin Elizabeth Hill-Parks

Discourses of Cinematic Culture and the Hollywood Director: The Development of Christopher Nolan’s Auteur Persona Erin Elizabeth Hill-Parks


The development of what is now known as auteur theory is commonly credited to the French film critics of Cahiers du Cinéma who first popularized the idea of the auteur in the early 1950s (Astruc, 1968; Truffaut, 1976; Hillier, 1985, 1986).

The auteur, although never having a complete and codified definition, was a director, often working within the restrictive Hollywood system, who rose above the subject matter or conditions of production to create a work of art, thereby imprinting his, or rarely her, viewpoint and style in the film.
p. 20

The auteur was a director “consistently expressing his own unique obsessions, the other [was] a competent, even highly competent, filmmaker, but lacking the consistency which betrayed the profound involvement of a personality” (Caughie 1981: 10). Therefore, the traditional notion of an auteur is a director who consistently displays an artistic signature in the films he or she directs, making the director the primary source for artistry and unity in not just an individual film, but in a set of films
p. 21

 Furthermore, technological changes with cameras and other equipment allowed for new aesthetic possibilities in cinema, including lighter cameras enabling outside, natural shooting. These conditions, among others, contributed to a new way of thinking about directors and cinema, as happened again with New Hollywood directors, discussed later in this chapter, as well as current thinking on auteurs.
p. 22

As Marjut Salokannel argues “we must remember that cinema involves the intersection of three concurrent forms of social practice: the artistic, the economic, and the technological. The structure of each of these is determined by a specific set of historical and social conventions, with their own inherent power-relations” (2003: 152). Film theories and methods do not occur out of isolation or because of a solitary influence, but rather through a complex negotiation of factors that inevitably derives from different levels of discourse being influenced by others. The rise of the contemporary auteur in this research could only happen at a specific time of technical innovation and cultural change resulting in new modes of production and methods of consumption.
p. 22

While this opened the door for new artistic freedoms in film, “first and foremost the new ratings system was a business proposition. The studios needed to update their product lines and the new code was a means toward that end” (Lewis, 1998a: 90). Because, as Justin Wyatt notes, “aesthetic ‘products’ are presented to suit the conditions of the overall market, and as the marketplace shifts across time, so does the product” (1998a: 64), Hollywood noticed that younger directors were attracting a sizable audience for a small production budget, and so studios granted these directors a high amount of freedom to make films.
p. 25

The auteur in Hollywood has always been a commercial one, with artistic goals and financial concerns ever present together. The rise of the blockbuster era was not the death of New Hollywood, but rather a shifting of artistic concerns to align with commercial demands, which is still seen in contemporary cinema with auteur blockbusters (Flanagan, 2004).

Thomas Schatz notes that in the mid-1970s, “while Coppola was in the Philippines filming Apocalypse Now [1979] […] his protégés Lucas and Spielberg were busy refining the New Hollywood’s Bruce15 [special effects, sensationalism] aesthetic (via Star Wars and Close Encounters), while replacing the director-as-author with a director-as-superstar ethos” (1993: 20).

To make a personal statement or an impact on a film, then, directors must carefully choose the projects they work on, finding one that can be both financially successful and also allow for their own imprint. The more successful a director is at balancing the artistic and commercial sides of film, the more freedom he or she will have to do a more personal project. Steven Soderbergh’s work as a director is an example of this, with both mainstream blockbuster and personal, artistic films alternating in his filmography (Scott, 2009).

Warren Buckland  “that an auteur in contemporary Hollywood is a director who gains control over all the stages of filmmaking: not just film production, but also distribution and exhibition” (2003: 84), suggesting that both small and big budget films could be considered auteur vehicles depending on the level of power the director had over the project and the ensuing media outlets. Buckland proposes that power within the Hollywood industry is an indicator of being an external auteur because the director is able to control aspects outside of the film. According to this theory, one must be both an internal auteur, controlling the aspects within each film, and an external auteur, having power in key decisions in the distribution, marketing, and exhibition of the film, to be a contemporary auteur. Although not at the same level of power as Buckland’s subject Spielberg, Christopher Nolan has become an external as well as internal auteur as seen through his roles as director, producer, and writer of most of his films as well as the freedom to move between genres, adaptations, and original works.
p. 29

One of the most influential studies on the auteur outside of the text in the past two decades came from Timothy Corrigan’s A Cinema Without Walls (1991), where he suggests the idea of a commercial, not just artistic, auteur. Framed in a discussion of postVietnam War American films, Corrigan proposes that the auteur, rather than being considered a Romantic, solo, artistic individual who fought against production constraints, could instead be viewed as “a commercial strategy for organizing audience reception” (1991: 103, emphasis in original). For Corrigan the auteur was not something present only in the films, but also outside of the film in the discursive surround and, moreover, had been commodified to the point where he or she was not truly present within the text, but instead interacted more directly with the audience outside of the text.
p. 43

Instead, Corrigan saw the auteur as being constructed outside of the text and perpetuated primarily through interviews. For example, Corrigan singled out director Francis Ford Coppola “as the auteur-creator victimized by the forces of [industrial, goliathan] productions” (1991: 109, emphasis in original) who had to maintain this carefully constructed auteur identity to sell his films, rather than being an auteur through his art. Corrigan suggests Coppola is successful as a commercial auteur where his auteur status remains independent of the quality of his work, but instead is dependent on the self-promotion of his image.
p. 43

Although the industrial auteur is primarily based on an origination point in official discourse, it is also predicated on the idea that audiences will understand the industrial references. The idea of the industrial auteur leads to a method of study that takes “into consideration the increasingly complicated relation between audiences and film-related forms of media (magazines, interviews, on-location reports, reviews, and the making-of featurette)” (Tzioumakis, 2006: 60). In this case the industrial auteur works within the cinematic industry in multiple ways to procure a reputation for not just his or her work, but also for him or herself, which is then incorporated with and compared to the films he or she produces (Flanagan, 2004).
p. 47

Christopher Nolan has worked as both a commercial and industrial auteur, as well as a blockbuster auteur, and constructed a specific persona by appropriating the thriller and noir genres onto new forms (independent, revenge, comic book, and period-fantasy films), forging a reputation for placing independent film sensibilities in mainstream Hollywood films as well as intelligence and creativity. Both the commercial auteur and the industrial auteur concepts can be incorporated into the author function, constructing an auteur persona which allows for a method of studying the multiple factors involved in constructing the auteur, both inside and outside of the text.
p. 47

The auteur was becoming an integral component in the cultural promotion of his or her film and could be seen as a cultural agent within the film world. Although the auteur is still predicated on the film, “there are many kinds of auteurs in contemporary film culture. And there are many strategies through which a movie maker can employ the agency of auteurism and by which audiences can use it as a way of understanding films” (Corrigan, 1998: 58). One of the ways of being an auteur is to become a celebrity – an auteur star. While this can be compatible with forming an auteur persona, there are two primary considerations with the auteur star: possible fissures in the filmic world and factors of temporality. Creating a successful auteur persona requires complementing the film world’s themes and ideas and also developing a persona that will be accessible beyond the contemporary moment.
p.48

This research suggests that the careful balancing of the auteur-star culture with a specific and relatively stable persona will help emphasize the continuity and artistry of the films, creating an auteur persona, rather than distract from the film or create irreparable fissures. Andrew notes, summarizing Gilles Deleuze, that “the auteur marks the presence of temporality and creativity in the text, including the creativity of emergent thought contributed by the spectator” (1993: 83), suggesting that the auteur is still present within the text as a mark of quality and creation, but the viewer also has a role to play in composing a type of intertext of the film, bringing their own understanding to the film and the notion of director. Christopher Nolan creates a consistent persona that reflects the auteur-star trappings of self-promotion to some extent with interviews and DVD materials, but creates a solid film world separate from any direct mixing, or folding in, of the viewer’s world. His persona, instead, gently guides readings of the film by emphasising themes, such as the double and identity, rather than things such as product placements.2
p.49