Auteur people

Alexandra Coburn on why having been “done” before can be a film’s greatest asset.

It’s France and it’s 1954. A burgeoning film movement is unfolding, one which rails against an older style of filmmaking marked by verisimilitude and literary adaptations. A group of young filmmakers and writers, now titans of the French New Wave, coalesce around critics André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, who had formed influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema just three years prior. New Wave darling Francois Truffaut publishes a formative article that has probably since been assigned in every film school; in it, he coins the phrase ‘la politique des auteurs.’

Translated into English as auteur theory, Truffaut’s landmark essay calls for an elevation of the role of ‘director’ to artist, to god of his own cinematic creation. The auteur director is an appealing idea, as it romanticizes the ‘great artist’ by equating them spiritually with their work. Despite its flaws, it can be a helpful way of looking at the impact a director has not only on their own films, but on the movement with which they’re associated. After all, it’s nearly impossible to think about the French New Wave without Godard, or the American New Wave without Scorsese. Auteur directors come from across the globe and across time, but there is one critical disparity in the mechanics of authorship, and that is its exclusivity. The apparatus of authorship is one which acts against a sense of collectivity—you cannot feel special if you are just one of many artists operating within the same framework.

For example, before the release of polarizing summer blockbuster Barbie, director Greta Gerwig unveiled ‘The Official Barbie Watchlist’ on Letterboxd. A quick scan of the list reveals the usual suspects for any 21st century movie that is candy-colored and highly stylized: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), and even 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). In fact, while entering 2001 into the Google search bar to confirm its release year, the first generated prompt was ‘2001 A Space Odyssey Barbie’. More than anything, Barbie is a series of carefully selected signifiers which, when placed within a two hour film, evoke nostalgia from audience members of all ages. In one sequence, Ken evicts Barbie from her dreamhouse by throwing her outfits from the balcony. As each clothing piece is tossed, it is suspended in mid-air alongside the actual name of the product, harkening back to a time when it was on real-life shelves.

Despite an obsession with individual genius fueled by Letterboxd lists and YouTube video essays, we are in the age of pastiche. Perhaps we always have been, always will be. I remember being given the Wes Anderson coffee table book for my 16th birthday and immediately flipping to the section in which he rattles off all of his favorite filmmakers. As a result, I fled to Ozu, Tati, and de Palma, and I chided my friends for not knowing about these figures who I myself had just learned of. To feel as if you personally discovered important filmmakers is a generational cycle. Ironically, it is the directors who have become most synonymous with their own personal ‘brand’—like Anderson or Tarantino—who are most obviously borrowing from other films. Successful collagists nearly supersede their original influences.

To market a film now becomes, paradoxically, an act of meticulous curation coupled with an assertion that this, whatever ‘this’ is, has never been done before. Christopher Nolan touted Oppenheimer’s usage of alternating black-and-white and color as if it were a totally new invention and not something utilized in 1939 for The Wizard of Oz. Barbie’s marketing positioned the film as a landmark of inclusion because it was a blockbuster with a female director, despite the box office success of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless and Penelope Spheeris’s Wayne’s World. Ironically, this approach even erases the box office success of Gerwig’s previous films. We’re trapped in a rugged individualism time loop.

The youth of the audience must have something to do with this. When you’re young, everything feels like it’s happening for the first time, and this is presented as the main reason to be invested. In a culture that is so obsessed with nostalgia bait, I somehow find it hard to believe that we’ve yet to find a way to market curation. We are in a golden era of collage, but we tend toward the ahistorical in a way that feels distinctly linked to the myth of American exceptionalism. There is no shame in carving out a spot within a larger tradition; the alternative seems to be incredibly lonely.

This trend is intertwined with modern film culture’s migration from real-life screenings to social media. In many ways, this is a wonderful thing. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky as the Token Girlfriend in a very incestuous and masculine film scene which I am also paradoxically indebted to, our gods were the employees at the resale Blu-ray store. If it weren’t for the slightly older girls I followed on Tumblr and Twitter, I would not have had an outlet to talk about the types of films I really loved. I was armed with my used Criterion copy of Une Femme Est Une Femme, a 16mm projector bought off eBay from a church, internet access, and a dream. Now in New York City, I want for almost nothing when it comes to repertory film programming; but at 16, I was lucky to get the occasional midnight screening of Do the Right Thing or Blue Velvet.

The above paragraph is to say please do not fret—I am one of you, a technical Gen Z cusper! When I critique the gaps of online film communities I do so out of love and familiarity. But when Film Twitter (™) or TikTok critics present a rotating list of old films for their very young audiences as if this is new information, I can’t help but remember that curation is a real skill. We used to turn to writers like Amy Taubin, Andre Bazin, or Pauline Kael to give us a cinematic almanac. Beyond film criticism, they were theorizing filmic trends as they happened, generating a massive library of reviews and write-ups that tracked the progression of various new waves in real time. This physical archive could never be ahistorical, because it is very difficult to forget the past when you are holding it in your hand.

Now, I work in a film archive, and I can lay out newspaper clippings end to end and watch the American auteur movement of the 1970s die. I can read box office numbers for filmmakers’ first films with the foresight that one day, they’ll be selling out theaters. ‘Pastiche’ is often used as a slightly derogatory description—directors are accused of pastiche, as if in the year 2023 it is truly possible to make a film that doesn’t rest on the backs of all the films which came before. The most idyllic result of this trend is the resurgence of interest in arthouse cinemas; in a utopia, this would amount to a monetary acknowledgement that good repertory film programming is visionary and worthwhile.

The Dirt: To become immortal, and then die.

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