The Rise and Fall of the Auteur

In the March 30, 1948 edition of “L‘Écran française”, French filmmaker and film critic Alexandre Astruc published an article entitled “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” (translated) wherein he called for a new type of cinema in which all components, regardless of whether they already existed in a different art form (i.e. words or music) or were unique to cinema (i.e. movement), were given equal importance with the ultimate aim of representing thought on screen– an ability ascribed chiefly to the novel prior to this point, although attempted by many of the avant-garde filmmakers of the late 1910s and 1920s. Already a language made up of visual clues had developed in cinema (ex. leaves falling indicating the passing of time, etc.) almost to the point of cliché, but Astruc wanted something more. “We have come to realize that the meaning which the silent cinema tried to give birth to through symbolic association exists within the image itself, in the development of the narrative, in every gesture of the characters, in every line of dialogue, in those camera movements which relate objects to objects and characters to objects,” Astruc wrote, “The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen.” It was this thought that laid the groundwork for what became know as the auteur theory– the auteur being a filmmaker who exploited all possible avenues of the cinema medium to present a specific message, thought, or intent. The auteur theory legitimized cinema studies as an academic field because it suggested that everything in a film was put there with overriding intent– much like a writer chooses his words in an effort to bring about a particular reaction in his readers’ minds– therefore analyzing a film can be done in the same way that we can analyze a novel or other “high” art forms. Auteurs– Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, and Pedro Almodóvar, to name a few– have permeated both the mainstream and arthouse cinema industry in the 65 years since Astruc wrote his article, however more recently, the postmodern age has brought with it its own critique of the Auteur Theory.

Let us take, for example, a contemporary auteur by the name of Deepa Mehta and her film, Fire (1996). Deepa Mehta is a Toronto-based filmmaker who was born and raised in India. Fire is the first film in her elements trilogy, Fire, Earth (1998), and Water (2005). Fire tells the story of two sisters-in-law, Sita and Radha, who, in the midst of unhappy marriages, fall in love. Mehta has gone on record to say that one of her primary goals as a filmmaker is to bring a new, more modern conception of India to the West in an attempt to “de-exoticise” her native country. Fire’s more mainstream-conventional structure (a narrative-driven plot, strict adherence to chronology and continuity, etc.) and her decision to have all of the characters speak English are evidence of her attempt to widen the film’s appeal to a general world audience.

Another consequence of the auteur theory is that it means any analysis of any one scene can be applied to the larger message of the film because the auteur has put great thought into even seemingly meaningless scenes. For example, a scene approximately three quarters into the movie in which Sita and Radha dance together in an obvious homage to Bollywood films. At this point in the film, Sita and Radha have become very close, but are not yet lovers. This scene is intended to show their increasingly flirtatious attitudes towards each other.

The scene begins with Sita (the younger of the women and ostensibly the instigator of their relationship) dressed in a suit and baseball hat pulling Radha, who is dressed in traditional Indian clothing, out of a dark room and into the brightly lit livingroom. Sita is connected to modern-ness throughout the film (she tries on a pair of jeans shortly after coming to her husband’s home at the beginning of the movie), but her name, which is the same as a Hindu deity who represents womanhood, purity, and self-sacrifice, indicates that she is intended to be the merging of past and future that Mehta says is necessary if society is to change.

The scene is also an homage to Bollywood: the lipsyncing and dancing is a classic Bollywood technique.  Radha blushes and shakes her head at the start of the dance like a dutiful blushing heroine should, but just as dance is used to symbolize courtship in Bollywood films, she and Sita become more comfortable and silly together as the scene progresses. The scene also parodies Bollywood– the masculine hero is in fact a woman in men’s clothing. The intent is two-fold: on the one hand, it shows how the media perpetuates a myth about love and relationships (neither of these women got the happy ending in their marriages that Bollywood or religion told them they would) and on the other, it shows how the traditional concept of love and relationships as defined by that between a man and a woman is no longer relevant.

The sequence also breaks up the point-of-view: we see the grandma looking at the couple, each woman looking at the other, the camera looking at them, and Mundu, the house servant, spying on them from outside. The camera tracks them as they dance, but at the beginning it stays outside of the room, shooting through doorways. We see walls even as the camera moves freely, reminding us that the women are still trapped physically, as well as mentally. We get to see the grandma’s perspective enjoying the spectacle when she still thinks it’s innocent, but also each woman’s burgeoning feelings. The scene ends with shots of the grandma’s and Mundu’s disapproving faces as they realize that the women may have feelings for each other that go beyond what is socially acceptable.

Just as in this scene, everything from the deliberately cramped set of the house, to the somber lighting that alternates in tone between romantic when the lovers are together and oppressive when the women are with their husbands, to Radha’s recounting of her husband’s vow of celibacy stemming from her sterility, is designed to show– with no room for argument– that patriarchal norms as perpetuated by the media and within society subjugate women. In fact, Mehta’s commitment to showing this effect has garnered censure from Indian audiences who claim she took it too far and disregarded reality to make her “real” depiction of Indian society. For example, throughout the course of the film, the sisters-in-law receive no visitors– not even at the beginning when Sita marries into the family– even though visiting friends and neighbors is a common practice in the city. Ultimately this bending of reality makes sense in the wider context of the film’s message, which is to say that in order to be free of the mental, physical, and sexual handicap imposed on women in a patriarchal society, women must engage in relationships with each other, although not necessarily of a sexual nature as evidenced by the fact that the sisters-in-law are more often depicted doing traditional acts of female friendship than they are having sex. This is the message Mehta claims she intended to portray.

Although, as argued above, Mehta as an auteur comes out in many aspects of Fire’s plot and aesthetic, at the same time, the film represents the postmodern idea of death of the auteur.

At the same time that postmodern films were coming out with rapidity in the 1960s, one of our favorite theorists, Roland Barthes, was writing about the nature of the auteur. Barthes argued that along with postmodernism came the death of the author/auteur. Barthes pointed out in his essay, “The Death of the Author” that, since we are all postmodern subjects, the reader/viewer will assign her own meaning to any given text/film regardless of the author’s intent. He went further to say that we hinder and limit our understanding of a text/film if we only attempt to analyze what the auteur had in mind; the postmodern subject is restricted from using her own experience and personal interpretations to connect the film to the world around her. If one restricts herself to the auteur’s meaning, she fixes the meaning of the film, which should not be the case in a film with postmodern subjects who have “no fixed, essential or permanent identity.” “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the author,” Barthes states in the essay. A key tenant of postmodernism and death of the auteur is the death of the high art-low art dichotomy. Auteur theory legitimized film as an academic field of study, but postmodernism and Barthes subverts that idea: high art is obsolete, so all art and film is worth a spectator’s analysis.

Although film analyst Avinash Jodha wrote that Mehta is so explicit in her metaphors that she leaves no room for misinterpretation, if we look at the same dancing sequence from Fire from a death of the auteur perspective, we realize that it could be (“mis”)interpreted in countless ways. As the two of us wrote our analysis of the sequence, we often came up with conflicting analyses. First, we discussed the role of Sita’s hat. One of us thought that the fact that it was sideways represented 90’s American fashion, whereas the other thought it just showed Sita’s silliness. We were fortunate in that our analysis was able to have a few added cultural nuances since one of our writers is ethnically Indian. Our Indian writer thought about the meaning of the servant’s name ‘Mundu.’ Mundu can mean a headrub with oil or a sarong that men often wear around the waist. Ultimately, we tried making several connections between the name and possible roles of the character, but couldn’t agree on any. Sometimes our analyses of the name bolstered Mehta’s messages, subverted them, or were completely tangential. This exemplifies the paradox of the auteur theory, and that all analyses of a film are valid.

RESOURCES

Astruc, Alexandre. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo”, 1948.

Chakrabarty, Bandana. “Female Bonding/Female Desire: Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” In Films, Literature and Culture: Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy, edited by Jasbir Jain, 119- 127. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2007.

Gosh, Shohini. Fire: A Queer Film Classic. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010.

Johda, Avinash. “Packaging India: The Fabric of Deepa Mehta’s Cinematic Art.” In Films, Literature and Culture: Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy, edited by Jasbir Jain, 39- 53. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2007.