1970s Auteur Cinema
Film is a collaborative art, unlike sculpting, painting or writing poetry. Nevertheless, upon viewing many works by a particular film director within a short time span, French film critics began to notice certain dominant stylistic and thematic focuses in some directors’ films. It’s as if a director were leaving an individual mark, a personal imprint on his/her body of work. Out of this notion that a filmmaker can leave a unique signature came the film theory “la politique des auteurs,” literally “authors’ policy,” commonly referred to as the Auteur Theory. We’ll find that the rise of this theory in America, originated by French film critics, provided the necessary catalyst that shaped Hollywood into the revitalized image of big budget cinema production we know it as today.
Although the concept of authorship in cinema is nearly as old as the medium itself, Francois Truffaut, one of the founders of French New Wave filmmaking, first formally articulated auteur theory in his 1954 interpretation of early film theorist Andre Bazin’s film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema. In fact, Truffaut once provocatively said, “There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors.” Truffaut knew that American filmmakers were working within the restrictions of the Hollywood system and that the types of films and their scripts were often decided for them but he still believed that such artists could nonetheless achieve a personal style in the way they shot a film, the formal aspects of it and the themes that they might seek to emphasize.
The idea of the auteur theory first appeared in America in the 1960s through Andrew Sarris, a U.S. film critic who wrote a highly influential book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. In this book he analyzes the history of American filmmaking through the careers and credited work of individuals, classifying them according to their respective talents. Before the seventies kicked in, auteur theory was merely bounced from critics and daily journalism to some pages of cinema literature, getting refined and further questioned of its importance but popularized in the process. Auteur theory’s wider recognition and true potential wasn’t fully realized until Hollywood was ready to ask for its help.
As the American film industry stood on the brink of its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a survey commissioned by the MPAA in 1968 revealed that 48 percent of the box-office admissions for that year were from the 16-24-year-old age group. From this they concluded, “being young and single is the overriding demographic pre-condition for being a frequent and enthusiastic moviegoer.” This audience was comprised of the growing children of the postwar baby boom, not only younger but also better educated and more affluent than Hollywood’s earlier audience. They grew up with the medium of television, learning to process the audiovisual language of film on a daily basis. There was also a rise in Film study in American colleges and universities insured that this generation would know more about what it saw on the screen in academic terms than any generation before it.
The studios woke up to this news and started to reassess what business decisions to move toward just weeks after the MPAA survey was published. Jonas Rosenfield, Jr., and 20th Century-Fox vice president for advertising and publicity, summarized the new thinking at a trade gathering: “We are tied to the youthful market of the future, we have to keep up with the rhythm of young people.” Another Fox executive, David Brown, went even further: “The cinema is today for youths in every corner of the world. Pictures with either artistic creativeness or critical content are helping both the industry and the film business…the world is in revolution. We are mirroring it.” Fox, Warners, and Paramount, each with new, young production chiefs, Richard Zanuck, Ken Hyman, and Robert Evans, respectively ordered, all announced their commitment to making a new style of movie that would allow directors more creative freedom and emphasize the cultivation of new talent.
Surrendering production control to directors was alien to the studio establishment. Younger executives tended to see auteurism as another way to market the product. Although it was market-driven, the studios’ embrace of auteurism represented a genuine attempt to bridge the generation gap, which brought with it a few years of real artistic freedom and resulted in some of the most original American films since the late forties.
Many new directors of the seventies were the first to have studied film as film in university graduate programs and professional schools. They had taken film history, aesthetics, and technical production as formal academic subjects as well as budgeting and marketing more thoroughly than any generation before them. The real reason why any of these “Hollywood Brats” or “Film Generation” students were given a chance was because film school meant cheap talent that was willing to work for non-union wages. Their youth also guaranteed their ability to address the new audio-visual sensibility of an audience like themselves. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as Hollywood was now desperately searching for fresh perspectives and stories to connect with its new youth market. Many of the prominent students include George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Brain De Palma but Francis Ford Coppola was the first front line figure of this new breed of directors.
Francis Ford Coppola began his career, as many filmmakers did, by working with Roger Corman, who took on many student apprentices. His first film, Dementia 13 (1963), was made with equipment and sets borrowed from another Corman picture on which he worked as a dialogue director. While thriving in the Hollywood filmmaking factory, Coppola begun to dream about creating a utopia for young filmmakers yearning for creative freedom. Along with his friend George Lucas, Coppola created American Zoetrope in San Francisco, California but suffered a massive blow when their first major production, THX 1138, turned out to be a financial disaster. Needing tons of cash, Coppola took a job directing Paramount Picture’s gangster movie, The Godfather, becoming one of the highest-grossing films in movie history and reigniting Marlon Brando's career. It earned Coppola his second Oscar for a screenplay, ushered in the era of blockbusters, and made him a rich man. The balance of the 1970’s was a thrilling time for him as he produced such classics as The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, co-written by friend/classmate writer/director, John Milius.
Francis Ford Coppola had won five Oscars before turning 40, had made some of the world's most admired films while enjoying amazing triumphs and enduring enormous setbacks. Most critiques of Francis Ford Coppola's career interweave film criticism with biography and produce an account of a wasted genius, a failed film brat, a director who had a few great years, produced some magnificent movies, but slid further and further downhill as time passed on. Now 68 years old and assumingly “done with film,” Coppola is presumed to be living in comfortable retirement on his vast wine estate in north California, his place in cinema history firmly assured. That is, until critics caught wind of Coppola’s new 2007 project, Youth Without Youth, an adaptation from Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade. It looks as though after a full decade hiatus, one of the greatest directors is back in the chair again. Despite this disappearance, Francis Ford Coppola’s sheer success and notoriety during the seventies mark him as not only one of the most well known auteur directors, but the most powerfully influential, paving the way for the slightly later successors of that decade: Lucas, Scorsese and Spielberg who in turn each became sources of great influence.
Although their fame and modern day success continues, the film brats were not the first auteur directors in the seventies. They actually caught the wake of several older directors in the previous decade who included, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn. They had already been well into their careers and were the first directors to be recognized as connecting with the new youth market in unconventional ways. These directors had latched onto fresh subject matter often dabbling in new perspectives of sex, violence, culture, religion and politics. By the mid-1960s, members of the Baby Boomer generation began to have great influence on Hollywood when responding well to these controversial subjects. They not only exerted tremendous power over the box office, but also over critical expectations as a new generation of film critics also began to enter the mainstream further pushing this new interest. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) directed by Arthur Penn, marks one of the first films to achieve success among this new generation of audience. The success of Bonnie and Clyde was nothing, however, compared to that of Mike Nichol’s The Graduate, which upon its release, in late December 1967, became one of the top ten domestic box office grossing films of all time. However one director has stood out as being particularly unique, and responsible for jumpstarting an industry’s focus on special effects, use of 70mm theatrical presentation, advanced event booking and musical scores like no other before him.
It was during this time of transition in Hollywood that director Stanley Kubrick established himself as a major force in American filmmaking. One of Hollywood’s most enigmatic personalities, Kubrick was a young filmmaker from the Bronx who had independently financed his first two features before drawing the attention of United Artists where he completed two more films, The Killing and Paths of Glory. He then directed Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel, Lolita about an older male professor and a 14-year-old female student. Finally, Kubrick received both critical and commercial success in 1964 with a Cold War satire, entitled Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It was only two weeks after Dr. Strangelove was released that Kubrick had already decided that his next project would be about outer space. A film publicist from Columbia Pictures urged Kubrick to contact Arthur C. Clarke, a British science fiction writer. Kubrick and Clarke planned to develop the 2001 story first as a novel, and then adapt a screenplay for the film. During the development of the story, the novel and screenplay ended up being written almost simultaneously. Throughout 1964, Kubrick and Clarke continued brainstorming and writing. By the end of the year they had come up with enough of a manuscript to sell the idea to MGM. In February of 1965, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer announced that they would finance the production of a science fiction film with the temporary title “Journey Beyond the Stars.” The film was budgeted at $6 million and was supposed to take two years to make. It would actually be another three years and $10.5 million before 2001: A Space Odyssey was finally released.
Stanley Kubrick’s meticulous research and pre-production for 2001 are the essences of his auteurism. Throughout his career most of his films have taken on epic journeys all with strange, ancient or foreign locations that evoke a certain respect to precision and authenticity. His command over environment is what brings not just his characters to life but the world in which they live in as well. During 2001’s filming, every detail of the production design, down to the most insignificant elements, was designed with technological and scientific accuracy in mind. It is no small credit to the research of Kubrick’s production crew that most audiences and critics still find 2001’s props and spaceships more convincing than many later science fiction movies.
2001 was finally released as a 70mm Super Panavision spectacular in 1968, which came with great enthusiasm and excitement from audiences. It was promoted on the same level as such films as Lawrence of Arabia and How the West Was Won. In major markets, 2001 was offered with advanced booking and reserved seating. The taglines read “an epic drama of adventure and exploration” and “the ultimate trip.” Kubrick implemented pioneering combinations of sound, music and visual special effects in a way that is as openly interpretable as the overall meaning of the film. Kubrick is quoted many times saying, “I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does...You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film.” While audience response was generally positive, even simply for the ride aspect of the picture’s fifteen-minute light show, critical review was very mixed. The films strange narrative encompasses the origins and destiny of man, which challenged even the most experienced critics.
This abstract work is apart of the few late sixties decade films that spearheaded the persuasion needed to transfer the studio power over to a director’s auteur-istic visions in the seventies through the disguise of monumental event marketing. Kubrick’s presence was felt into the seventies but with only two releases of A Clockwork Orange (1971), and then later Barry Lyndon (1975). His need to prepare and research his works before beginning serious production prevents him from coming out with films as quickly as other directs yet he distinctly holds a way of handling his films that makes their strenuous care seem worth it.
While Hollywood was enjoying a new burst of creative spirits while reaping generous profits the studios were still always looking for more and more directors. Crossover directors like Mel Brooks and John Cassavetes started out in different fields like writing or theater. With these specialize talents they each brought with them a unique style traceable back to their original fields.
Woody Allen’s career spans five decades and has earned him fourteen Academy Award nominations and three Oscars. He was born on December 1, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of 15, he started selling one-liners to gossip columns. Eventually Woody enrolled in film school at the New York University. He didn’t have the enthusiasm to attend classes frequently enough and got a D at the end of his first semester resulting in a flunk. After the semester he was thrown out of NYU as a failed student. In 1959, Woody began seeing a psychiatrist ever since. His long-term psychiatric experience often results in the appearance of analysts and jokes on them in his films. After working a while as a stand up comedian, he was hired to write What’s New, Pussycat (1965) and directed his first film a year later, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966). During the seventies Woody Allen finally got serious about writing for film and made seven features, one of them finally being a huge box office success, Annie Hall (1977).
With his strong background in writing, Woody Allen's films are dialogue-heavy. He works frequently with master shots and actor choreography, a technique easily traceable to his theatrical background of directing plays. Allen’s talent for writing came with an ability to also act and perform. Most of his films star him as the main male character or as a narrator throughout the story although his later releases have him behind the scenes. His films are taught in the departments of philosophy as well as film studies in many universities in both the U.S. and Europe. Both academic and popular film criticism on Allen most often employs psychoanalytic theory, as his subject matter corresponds easily to the Freudian concepts of desire, repression, sexuality and anxiety.
Annie Hall, like most of Woody Allen’s films, is a close resemblance to Woody Allen’s actual life and follows a character modeled specifically after Woody. Some say that the film was a love letter to Diane Keaton who he ended up dating for a short while off set during and after the picture. Aside from the Hollywood gossip, it’s because of this personal nature that the film’s narrative takes on special liberties such as a non-linear plot line and direct addresses to the audience, which at the time was rarely seen but shows up more frequently in today’s modern romance comedies. Woody’s direct addresses to viewers is also credited to the same personal style that gives him the ability to manipulate the plot. This role of narrator is almost an instinctual approach from his auteur vision, again adding to the personal motif found in and throughout the film. With his entire filmography totaling at 43 features in the director chair, Woody Allen still continues to release films and bring with them a personal flavor that is found in no other director.
Today, the notion of the individual as auteur is less theoretically constrained, so that we might consider actors as auteurs as well as directors and producers. The key thing is that a recognizable imprint is left on a body of films, and this may involve varying levels of creative input. However there still is something remarkable about a renaissance figure that speaks only through his own creation. With the cheapening and availability of equipment and the obsession of easily distributed/attainable video media it will be interesting to see how the next generation of auteurs develop over this new film industry landscape.
Bibliography:
Books:
Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-1979
David A. Cook. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000.
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. Andrew Sarris. New York, Dutton, c1968.
American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations. Lester D. Friedman. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, c2007.
American Cinema’s Transitional era : Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004.
Web:
The Genesis and Application of the Auteur Theory
http://www89.homepage.villanova.edu/elana.starr/pages/genesis_and_formulation_of_the_a.htm
Auteur Wars: How The Godfather script battle changed new Hollywood
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1758/pg1/index.html
Francis Ford Coppola Biographies
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000338/bio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Ford_Coppola
Stanley Kubrick Biographies
http://pages.prodigy.com/kubrick/kubbio.htm
http://www.palantir.net/2001/meanings/essay03.html
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000040/bio
Woody Allen Biographies
http://www.bestprices.com/cgi-bin/vlink/dvd_person?p_id=P----79388&view=bio&id=dJw7qHnf
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