Criteria of Value: Auteurism as Late Classical Film Theory

introduction

Auteurism occupies a strange place in the histories of film study and film theory. Often read primarily as an embarrassing vestige of the discipline’s past, the major debates over auteurism in the 1950s and ’60s are seen as disconnected from the major periods of film theory — neither classical nor contemporary, perhaps not even theory at all. In this essay I want to argue that we do not really know what auteurism is (or can be) because we do not really know what auteurism was. Our just-so stories about the history of auteurism occlude how figures like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael were not merely doing film criticism but were engaged in the very questions commonly associated with classical film theory — performing what James Morrison calls “a revaluation” of cinema’s criteria of value.[1]

Classical film theory is typically periodized as ending in the late 1940s, occasionally a bit later, in 1958, with the death of André Bazin; however, as D.N. Rodowick has noted, such periodization misses key texts that engaged in the questions of classical film theory like Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film in 1960 and Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed in 1971.[2] Following Rodowick’s lead and thinking of film theory as “the emergence and persistence of aesthetic, structural, and ideological or cultural modes of aesthetic writing on film” instead of distinct historical periods, I want to look at the auteurist period as a fertile ground for classical film theory. Rodowick calls this tradition the “aesthetic discourse” and sees it concerned “with questions of artistic value and the delimitation of aesthetic a prioris through which film’s singularity as an art form could be identified and assessed as well as compared with the other arts of space and of time.”[3] In this article I first argue for placing the development and debates of auteurism as a crucial moment in the transition between classical and modern (or in Rodowick’s terms, aesthetic and structural) film theory. I then turn to the most infamous moment of this period: the debate between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael over auteurism in the pages of Film Culture and Film Quarterly. In performing close readings of both “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” and “Circles and Squares” I sketch a preliminary picture of both authors’ impulses toward classical film theory, particularly in a romanticism shared by the two critics. By romanticism here I am referring broadly to a shared interest in the transformative and expressive powers of art and rhetoric — an interest I argue was lost in the transition from classical to modern film theory. More specifically, I invoke a conceptualization of the term shared by the philosophers Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell wherein romanticism is interested, in Rorty’s words, in the “priority of imagination over reason.”[4] Cavell alternately calls this romantic impulse an “attack on false necessities” in search of better ones, and I argue that revisiting Kael and Sarris in this context, as engaged with such an impulse, can reenliven the romantic concerns of classical film theory for today.[5]

auteurism in the history of film theory

The conventional story of auteurism is quite simple. In the 1950s and ’60s, the critics turned filmmakers of the French New Wave proudly declared themselves auteurs, claiming sole creative authority over their films. Auteurism offered a compelling framework for understanding cinema as an art form, elevating the director as the primary creative force and enabling the study of films as expressions of a singular artistic vision. American critic Andrew Sarris traveled to Paris during this time, befriending many of the critics at Cahiers du Cinéma and encountering their formulation of the politique des auteurs (or the auteur policy). After reviewing for Film Culture and the Village Voice and developing his own voice on auteurism, in 1962 he published the article “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” in Film Culture. The following year, Pauline Kael published “Circles and Squares,” a scathing response to Sarris in Film Quarterly. By the end of the decade, at least in academic circles, auteurism and authorship study more broadly had been thoroughly discredited as idealistic, romantic, and importantly politically suspicious as the major strains of film writing, including in auteurism’s birthplace, the Cahiers du Cinéma, moved toward ideology critique.[6] Despite this, auteurism persisted as both writers and students of film became auteur filmmakers themselves, maintaining the idea of film as a medium for personal expression.[7] While the mode in which contemporary film theory is taught today continues to see auteurism as an embarrassing remnant of this history, such a negative reception seems only to have ingrained auteurism more firmly in the language of cinephilia.

What gets lost in this story, among other things, is how auteurism fits into the larger changes in cinema culture and film theory of the postwar era. For instance, the work of critics and scholars like Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Peter Wollen, who in the late 1960s attempted to give auteurism an intellectual veneer by appending the structuralism then popular in French circles to their auteurist practices, are rarely read as part of the history of film theory. Rather, it is another moment showing the impossibility of turning auteurism into a capital-T Theory. However, when we look at the work of the auteur-structuralists of the late 1960s, we find them presenting their work as a kind of bridge between classical and modern film theory.

Wollen’s writing on auteurism belongs to — indeed, inaugurates — the cine-structuralist or auteur-structuralist model which attempts to evade talk of the real historical individuals (e.g. the directors Howard Hawks and John Ford) with recourse to structures named after them (e.g. “Hawks” and “Ford”) to inoculate auteurism from its most romantic impulses.[8] By structure, Wollen means “an explanatory device which specifies partially how any individual film works” requiring of critics and scholars “an operation of decipherment.”[9] This mode of decipherment, for Wollen, is particularly useful in finding authors in industrial circumstances that do not afford conventional signs of authorship — in particular looking to popular Hollywood cinema over European art films. What follows from this is a “structural approach” which looks for a “hard core of basic and often recondite motifs” which “gives an author’s work its particular structure, both defining it internally and distinguishing one body of work from another.”[10] Following Rodowick, we can see that Wollen’s auteurism attempted to bridge a gap between the romanticist aesthetic discourses of earlier auteurists and “the structural or semiological discourse … dominated by problems of meaning or signification in relation to the image.”[11] The auteur-structuralists wrote primarily in the UK in the 1960s and were dealing with a fast-­changing French intellectual culture across the Channel, but their goals were clear, as John Caughie notes in Theories of Authorship:

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argued that the combination of structuralism and auteurism represented an attempt to steer the course of film criticism between the “Scylla and Charybdis of pro-auteur subjectivism and anti-auteur empiricism,” to found a “materialist (or if you prefer, objective) basis for the concept of authorship,” which, by posing structures, even unconscious structures, would avoid the idealism of the concept of the auteur as a creating subject with intentions who was the source of all value in the text, while still being able to account for the fact that films by the same author had striking consistencies.[12]

Caughie describes the appeal of structuralism for these critics as a kind of “scientificness” but this is precisely what led to both orthodox structuralists (Charles Eckert) and romantic auteurists (Robin Wood) rejecting auteur-structuralism.[13] Orthodox structuralism rejected the centrality of authorship in any structuralist scientific account and the romantics found structuralism itself to be reductive in its empiricism. Auteur-structuralism thus declined as quickly as it rose, but what replaced it for most of film criticism and scholarship was not a renewed romanticism but a more explicitly political criticism which still saw itself as engaged in a kind of scientific inquiry of the ideological forces of cinema (perhaps best exemplified by Christian Metz’s Psychoanalysis and Cinema) and with it a decline in the importance of authorship to film study. However, as David Bordwell among others have noted, if “theory dictates that the author is dead, a great many symptomatic critics continue to hold séances.”[14]

Authorship as one mode of aesthetic discourse is by no means the only concept which lost prominence in this transition. Chris Dumas, in his book Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible, takes a different tack on looking at this history, pointing to another feature of midcentury film study which has fallen from respectability with auteurism: “Increasingly left aside [in contemporary film studies] are Cahiers-style auteurism and the related impulse to address questions of comparative aesthetics, that is, this director is better than that one.”[15] Auteurism for Dumas is not merely a separate field of inquiry about the nature of film authorship, but is deeply connected to questions of value that have been, perhaps more than even auteurism, left to the wayside by modern film studies. Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique has identified a similar trend in literary studies:

Among literary theorists, especially, talk about value was often met with a curled lip: spurned as antidemocratic, capricious, clubby, and in the thrall of a mystified notion of aesthetics. Critics continued to prefer some books over others and to explicate and elaborate on these books, sometimes with verve, acumen, and passion. Yet their reasons for doing so were often glossed over or else boiled down, as we will see, to the sole measure of their “criticality.”[16]

While I do not follow Felski in adopting the Latourian Actor-Network Theory-inspired prescription of post-critique, what I want to highlight is how the discursive trend she is critical of has contributed to a misunderstanding of auteurism’s role in the history of film theory. Felski writes: “Across the humanities, scholars are often trained not to articulate such values but to interrogate them, to recite the familiar Foucauldian mantra: Where does the discourse of values come from? What are its modes of existence? Which interests and power relations does it serve? … When asked to justify our attachments and defend our commitments, however, we often flounder and flail about.”[17] The move from auteurism as classical theory into the contemporary theory of the 1970s involved precisely the substitution of the latter questions for the former, and film studies has never really looked back since.

To elucidate how this shift in the value of valuation happened in film studies, it is worth pausing on the period following the death of auteurism for a moment to be explicit about what took its place. Following the move away from auteurism, there have been a number of attempts at resuscitating the auteur in various guises, however, in each case, I would argue, there was a subsumption of the romantic impulse of auteurism into a more seemingly academically legitimate form.[18] Bordwell’s 1989 book Making Meaning is a useful instance of this problem. While the above quote is an attack on the practices of contemporary film theory (particularly the structural and ideological types per Rodowick) for dismissing authorship study and doing authorship study in the same breath, Bordwell’s alternative to this kind of theorizing does not associate him either with classical film theory or the romantic impulse I am interested in developing in this article. While Making Meaning contains one of the best histories of criticism in the extant literature (which his later book The Rhapsodes continued), Bordwell’s approach in that text precisely subsumes any possible romantic justification for writing about any art form to a sociological or institutional explanation of professionalization — describing “ordinary criticism” as “a group of researchers using approved problem/solution routines to expand and fill out the realm of the known.”[19] Further, while explicitly denying that he accuses such work of being cynical, he ultimately reduces all interpretive writing about art to the “desire for credibility,” which “may in turn be based on a host of individual desires (ambition, service to a purpose, conviction that the truth should be spread).”[20] What is missing from Bordwell’s account here is the very possibility of liking a film, finding it inspiring, and wanting to share that with other people who love movies.[21]

There is a hard line between the romantic (what Dudley Andrew would call “humanist”) impulses of the early auteurists and accounts like Bordwell’s.[22] Dana Polan in his 2000 article “Auteur Desire” describes this dividing line as “that non-falsifiability that Bordwell in Making Meaning has so trenchantly pinpointed as endemic to an interpretative approach in the arts: nothing, except the will of the auteurist to see things this way, guarantees the reading.”[23] Polan and Bordwell take this nonfalsifiability as requiring a moving away from an exclusively interpretive approach to criticism and scholarship. For Bordwell this looks like the infamous midlevel research of Post-Theory, including a scientifically grounded cognitivist theoretical approach to spectatorship and a more social scientific approach to the practices of film scholars generally. For Polan, the shift would be to a kind of reflexivity in returns to authorship study that interrogate the conditions of our interests and attachments on the way to “a study of the work of directors that is fully and finally historical in the richest sense of that term.”[24] However, neither of these escape the problem Felski outlines above in which we have substituted the conditions of valuation for having values at all. What I am arguing is that the kind of revaluation that film studies needs is precisely to reinhabit an interpretive and cinephilic position that is nonfalsifiable, though perhaps not in the sense Bordwell and Polan mean; rather, in the sense that it is groundless beyond our investments and attachments and desire to share them. What Felski teaches us is not that any of the specific modes of criticality and reflexivity common in the interpretive humanities are in and of themselves without value. Instead, it is that we lack a language that can reknit a tie between author (critic, scholar) and work wherein our attachments to our claims are part of those claims. We should embrace the vulnerability of our claims because their only final ground is our interest in them, in our finding them to be important, meaningful, and valuable.[25] In turning back to Sarris and Kael, I want to ask how, in looking to this era explicitly as a form of classical film theory, we might stop floundering in this way, how we might bring cinephilia back as a value in the study of film and what role auteurism as a critical practice can play in such a project. In other words, and perhaps too romantically, I want a language for justifying why we write about films, show our students films, that goes beyond intellectual interest or historical importance, that embraces the study of film art for its beauty, for its greatness, for its own sake.

sarris

“Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” is a resoundingly strange text, not simply because it is likely better known through the gloss Kael gives it in “Circles and Squares,” but because the version that most students in film studies see is a four page excerpt anthologized in Mast and Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings.[26] Where the excerpt begins with Sarris’s definition of the auteur theory, the original publication in Film Culture starts with an epigraph from Kierkegaard and Sarris affirming the most controversial claim of his auteur theory: “Am I implying that the weakest [John] Ford is superior to the strongest [Henry] King? Yes!”[27] Sarris here is developing a defense of the auteur theory that starts from the position that auteurism has already been under attack since its development in the Cahiers du Cinéma. Indeed, the critique Sarris primarily concerns himself with came from within the Cahiers itself: André Bazin’s article “La Politique des auteurs” which argued primarily that auteurism’s first sin is the tendency to overpraise bad or mediocre films when they come from a director the critic already admires. The first half of Sarris’s essay (the half not anthologized) is an extended exploration of this critique, though Sarris takes a meandering approach to it that touches on the purpose of criticism and expertise, the status of unpopular works by aging film directors, and the status of the American cinema. His aim is not for certainty or verifiability in answering a claim like “the weakest Ford is superior to the strongest King.” Rather, his interest is defining what robust criticism ought to look like and do in combating a manipulative grandstanding snobbery he finds among his contemporaries.

Before the often strange esotericism commonly associated with Sarris’s arguments, he shows himself primarily interested in the wider shape of the culture surrounding art forms like film by arguing that a common auteurism leads to a wider appreciation of whichever art form it is focused on:

If the man in the street could not invoke Shakespeare’s name as an identifiable cultural reference, he would probably have less contact with all things artistic. The Shakespearean scholar, by contrast, will always be driven to explore the surrounding terrain with the result that all the Elizabethan dramatists gain more rather than less recognition through the pre-eminence of one of their number. Therefore on balance, the politique as a figure of speech does more good than harm.[28]

The value of a canon for Sarris is how it facilitates a wider appreciation of the art form as a whole through the work of enthusiasts and experts. It is worth noting here how this fits into the tradition of questions Rodowick identifies with classical film theory. When describing the common concerns of classical film theory, Rodowick identifies one of its pillars by asking: “What is the value or role of cinema, both artistically and socially?”[29] While Sarris’s more detailed examinations of individual directors get more explicit about his vision of the value of cinema, this initial position captures something important not about cinema as such, but about the serious study of any art form. Debates over canonicity are important because they provide a common ground for not only the expert, but the enthusiast and the casual audience of that canon, providing lines and genealogies for the expansion of interest in a medium for those who want to pursue it. And with that expansion of interest, the common ground of canon also expands and changes.

Sarris’s interest in the polemical nature of auteurism follows from this interest to another area of classical theory, that of establishing the value of cinema as an art as such: “Since it has not been firmly established that the cinema is an art at all, it requires cultural audacity to establish a pantheon for film directors. Without such audacity, I see little point in being a film critic. Anyway, is it possible to honor a work of art without honoring the artist involved?”[30] This is a rather simple point, but one that is often lost in contemporary academic writing on film.[31] Sarris wants to celebrate great films and great filmmakers and finds in auteurism a means of doing so. While contemporary scholars might find his reasons naive, there is something refreshing in the honesty of his position and the rest of Sarris’s exposition is dedicated to how to do this in a way that is broadly accessible and useful for film culture. His next move after defending auteurism’s audacious polemicism is a critique of auteurists he deems snobby:

Unfortunately, some critics have embraced the auteur theory as a short-cut to film scholarship. With a “you-see-it-or-you-don’t” attitude toward the reader, the particularly lazy auteur critic can save himself the drudgery of communication and explanation. … Without the necessary research and analysis, the auteur theory can degenerate into the kind of snobbish racket which is associated with the merchandising of paintings.[32]

In the place of the commonly known three concentric circles of Sarris’s auteur theory, from which Kael’s response takes its name and which I will return to below, we find instead a call for rigorous criticism because Sarris is not merely concerned with what is true but with how critics and experts communicate the greatness of cinema as an art and cinema’s greatest examples as instances of art.

This concern bleeds into Sarris’s writing on aging auteurs and the American cinema as he finds in both cases an unjustifiable maligning of real aesthetic achievements. Against Bazin’s recourse to culture and industry as explanation for unique features of the American cinema he writes, “If directors and other artists cannot be wrenched from their historical environments, aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate branch of ethnography.”[33] And in defense of aging auteurs he argues that “as a director becomes older, he is likely to become more profoundly personal than most audiences and critics can appreciate.”[34] But the key passage for defining Sarris’s classical theory comes later (though still not in the section commonly excerpted):

I know the exceptions to the auteur theory as well as anyone. I can feel the human attraction of an audience going one way when I am going the other. The temptations of cynicism, common sense and facile culture-mongering are always very strong, but somehow I feel that the auteur theory is the only hope for extending the appreciation of personal qualities in the cinema. By grouping and evaluating films according to directors, the critic can rescue individual achievements from an unjustifiable anonymity. If medieval architects and African sculptors are anonymous today, it is not because they deserved to be.[35]

Here Sarris puts himself distinctly in the camp of Alexandre Astruc and the caméra-stylo by not merely advocating a descriptive position, but a prescriptive one about what makes films valuable. In the second half of Sarris’s essay he identifies “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value” as one of his key premises of the auteur theory.[36] Pauline Kael critiqued Sarris here explicitly on his use of the word distinguishable: “The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?”[37] While I will turn to Kael and “Circles and Squares” in a moment, what is worth noting here is how the dispute between the two is explicitly over what role the personal qualities of a film play in our appreciation. In the same way that we recognize André Bazin’s realism and Sergei Eisenstein’s formalism as statements about the value of films, Sarris here is showing himself to be a romantic.

I mean romantic in a quite broad sense here, wherein art is valued primarily for its expressive qualities and thus maintains an interest in the artists doing the expressing. As Richard Rorty has noted, this kind of romantic position can be easily confused with a kind of conservative ­idealism.[38] Indeed, that Sarris might be a kind of cultural conservative who is obsessed with individual genius and a great-man theory of history is not uncommon in his reception.[39] However, following Rorty, we can read this romantic position in a more grounded and humble way. Genius, for Rorty, is a matter of imagination. “To be imaginative,” he writes, “one must both do something new and be lucky enough to have that novelty adopted by one’s fellows — incorporated into their ways of doing things.”[40] It is Rorty’s emphasis on luck that makes his understanding of romanticism useful for thinking about Sarris. On the one hand, it can point us to the variety of ways that luck can be a matter of privilege (a key claim in arguments about expanding the canon away from the traditional white male artist). On the other, the subject of luck for Rorty is a matter of the choices of those we are in community with — how we take up, celebrate, and critique the work of our predecessors and contemporaries matters. This is how Sarris’s arguments about criticism intersect with his auteur theory — rescuing works from unjustified anonymity and dedicating one’s life and work to persuasion and aesthetic education is a romantic way to conceive of the practice of writing about film. Sarris favors films that exhibit personal qualities of their makers and desires more films that have such qualities. This is a quality of Sarris’s auteur theory that generally goes unremarked, though he is quite explicit about the personal nature of his own writing elsewhere. In The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 he writes of the work as a kind of “emotional autobiography.”[41]

This leads to the most famous section of Sarris’s essay, his three premises of the auteur theory which define the criteria of value for evaluating a director: “The three premises of the auteur theory may be visualized as three concentric circles, the outer circle as technique, the middle circle personal style [or, as we saw before, ‘distinguishable personality’], and the inner circle interior meaning.”[42] With the rest of the article as context we can see how Sarris’s premises and criteria of value are marshaled towards what James Morrison calls “a theory of revaluation, a call to reconsider the most basic assumptions about what makes a great film ‘great.’”[43] Sarris’s classical film theory values film as personal effort and expression, seeking films and filmmakers that show “the ultimate glory of cinema as an art.”[44] The study of the history of cinema (Sarris describes his auteurism as a theory of film history) is about finding and celebrating these great filmmakers not because theirs should be the only films celebrated, but because the study of great artists enlivens engagement with the rest of the medium. Sarris’s most important contribution, at least for the interests of this essay, is his totalizing defense of the study of film in and of itself. This emphasizes the role many of these midcentury critics saw for themselves. Just as Astruc, Truffaut, and the other critics at Cahiers du Cinéma saw themselves as presenting a revaluation of what film could be and why it was important for French cinephiles, Sarris did the same for American readers. Where Kael asks of Sarris “what his ideals of movies are and how various films live up to or fail to meet his ideals,” Sarris might respond that his system does just that.[45]

kael

“Circles and Squares” was published in the Spring 1963 issue of Film Quarterly. Prefaced by what Morrison describes as “a perplexed and muddled account of French auteurism and a disapproving take on its influence,” it evidenced the deep divisions in American film culture that Sarris was responding to in his article.[46] It is clear both that Auteurism was by this point a well-known part of cinephilia in the United States and that it had already generated substantial controversy. Morrison in his account of “Circles and Squares” has already covered the substance of Kael’s invective against Sarris, noting the strange amount that she concedes to Sarris’s auteurism at the outset:

Not only does she grant as an article of faith filmmakers’ status as “artist” — a word she uses more freely than Sarris does — but she confers authorial rank on directors, even disfavored ones, without batting an eye. … Only in passing does Kael note the problem of collaboration that was grist for so many other critical mills. Whatever qualms she lodged against the auteur theory, her own blithe elevation of the director to the principal creative position could only mitigate them. Nor is she especially exercised about the auteurist penchant for tracing motifs from film to film, noting that this is common for critics in any art form.[47]

Morrison describes these concessions as surprising because of how frequently Kael is taught or described as an antiauteurist when accounting for this exchange. More than anything Kael is against theory: “Her approach denigrates theory itself as an intellectual activity, and film theory especially as poisonously pedantic, a violation of cinema’s basic pleasure principle.”[48] In this section, against Kael’s disdain for all things theory, I want to read her piece as its own statement of purpose answering the questions posed by classical film theory’s aesthetic discourse. Rather than recounting the delight with which she attacks Sarris, I want to highlight how her attacks on “academic theories” are their own kind of romantic classical film theory.

Within Kael’s attacks on Sarris and auteurism there is an even more fervent defense of the importance of criticism than Sarris’s broadsides against snobbery. Positioning herself against critics using theory to guide their criticism, Kael writes, “Criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see.”[49] While to a certain extent cliché, Kael’s emphasis on the original is one of the more controversial aspects of her criticism, not least because of her inconsistency in applying it. Kael was infamous for her distaste of modernist and avant-garde cinema, including in “Circles and Squares” itself where much of the last section of the essay is an attack on avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. I note this not to call Kael a hypocrite, but to emphasize a commonality between Kael and Sarris in their enthusiasm for popular cinema and especially popular criticism. Later in the article, Kael writes,

The Role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work than they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized … He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others.[50]

In other words, Kael values originality and verve in both filmmaking and criticism because they make enthusiasm widely available. Aside from a reliance on theory, what Kael has against the auteurists is their celebration not of mediocrity but of repetition, which is then reflected in their writings on mediocre films of favored auteurs: “If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?”[51] Indeed, Kael finds this repetitious laudatory auteur criticism as genuinely insulting to real artists: “It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that you are incapable of judging either.”[52]

This argument then extends into a critique of Sarris’s second premise, that the distinguishable personality of a filmmaker is a criterion of value. As mentioned above, Kael believes such a premise makes judgment of the personality itself impossible, writing of the auteurists’ love for Hitchcock as a response based in gullibility because they keep being impressed by his “uniformity, his mastery of tricks, and his cleverness at getting audiences to respond according to his calculations.”[53] For Kael, the visibility of a filmmaker’s personality is not something to be celebrated:

Often the works in which we are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst films — when he falls back on the devices he has already done to death. When a famous director makes a good movie, we look at the movie, we don’t think about the director’s personality; when he makes a stinker we notice his familiar touches because there’s not much else to watch.[54]

Using this as a comparison with Sarris we can see how Kael’s antitheoretical polemic generates a real difference between the two critics. For Sarris, the importance of seeing value in lesser works with the assistance of a theory of auteurs is in some way that it makes watching the movie more enjoyable. For Kael, films and our reception of them are informed by our contexts, but those contexts seem to call out for something new that will enliven our world precisely because there is an openness to aesthetic experience that no formula can fill. One of the more beautiful passages in “Circles and Squares” outlines this ethos as a response to Kael’s impression of Sarris’s system as fundamentally anti-criticism.

They’re like those puzzled, lost people who inevitably approach one after a lecture and ask, “But what is your basis for judging a movie?” When one answers that new films are judged in terms of how they extend our experience and give us pleasure, and that our ways of judging how they do this are drawn not only from older films but from other works of art, and theories of art, that new films are generally related to what is going on in the other arts, that as wide a background as possible in literature, painting, music, philosophy, political thought, etc., helps, that it is the wealth and variety of what he has to bring to new works that makes the critic’s reaction to them valuable, the questioners are always unsatisfied. They wanted a simple answer, a formula; if they approached a chef they would probably ask for the one magic recipe that could be followed in all cooking.[55]

Where for Sarris the importance of developing a robust criticism is about enlivening and expanding film culture from experts to casual moviegoers, Kael’s vision of a robust criticism is larger. Her suspicion of phrases like the “ultimate glory of cinema as an art form” or “cinema as a universal entity” stem from the connectedness of cinema to the rest of art, culture, politics, and history. She bristles against Sarris’s desire for separating aesthetics from ethnography because she finds it ludicrous to see aesthetics as separable from “the study of man and his environment.”[56]

If Sarris’s romantic impulse can be drawn out through reference to Richard Rorty, Kael’s position seems more in line with how Stanley Cavell understands the term.[57] As quoted above, Cavell sees romanticism as engaged in an “attack on false necessities” in order “to find truer necessities.”[58] Cavell, as with Rorty, is writing about the relationship between philosophy and poetry, though his emphasis is more concerned with how a romantic attitude prompts changes to the self, whereas Rorty is more concerned with the social. He sees romanticism as a “demand for, or promise of, redemption, say self-recovery,” inspired by the American transcendentalists who saw the routines of their contemporaries as constituting a kind of “quiet desperation.”[59] Kael’s “puzzled, lost people” who search for simple answers for aesthetic questions betray this kind of quiet desperation, showing a lack of trust in their responsiveness to art and to themselves which both Kael and Cavell saw as their task to correct.

We can see this interest for Kael in the underdiscussed final section of “Circles and Squares” where she speculates about the appeal of the auteur theory beyond its capacity for easy answers. Offering a speculative history of the development of auteurism in France, she argues that following World War II, French cinephiles and critics took up a celebration of the American cinema, particularly its gangster and Western films, as vital in a way that French “socially conscious problem pictures” were not.[60] Their mistake was in trying to justify their adoration with “elaborate intellectual and psychological meanings.”[61] But for American critics to take up this adoration of American commercial cinema is particularly pernicious as it limits the scope and diversity of what cinema can be: “We see many elements in foreign films that our movies lack. We also see that our films have lost the beauty and innocence and individuality of the silent period, and the sparkle and wit of the ’thirties.”[62] For Kael, American commercial cinema is “ludicrously inadequate to our needs” and limits the possibilities of what kinds of films can be made. In a counterintuitively auteurist move, Kael sees Sarris’s critique of the writer-directors of European art films as severely hampering the possibility of seeing “what an artist can do when he’s in control of the material, when the whole film becomes expressive.”[63] While her speculation finally turns to the chauvinism so clearly visible in the writings of Sarris and Mekas — here I’m thinking of the moment in The American Cinema where, rather than referring to Kael by name, he just calls her “a lady critic with a lively sense of outrage,” or in “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1970” where he makes a misogynistic jab at Kael’s “misguided feminist zeal” — in reading “Circles and Squares” as a kind of classical film theory, it seems worth asking what American cinema needed for Kael.[64] A wider diversity of options in film style, certainly, and we can note her celebration of names like Robert Altman and Brian De Palma in the New American Cinema of the 1970s as evidence for this. But I think beyond this, Kael’s interest was primarily against the pretensions of fashionability and the disinterestedness “common enough in the business world, that it’s better not to get too involved.”[65] Whether or not this is an entirely fair as a critique of Sarris (I would argue it isn’t), it is remarkable how romantic her position ultimately is. She imagines criticism and film both as kinds of aesthetic education, teaching a responsiveness to art and the world that eschews easy answers in favor of a recovery of our selves and capacities for aesthetic experience. While I would want to replace the word “theory” with “formula” (which she also uses) in her invectives against academicized criticism — regarding theory not as a way to generate easy answers but a way to ask deeper questions — her attack on formula is not only well founded, but deeply needed today.

conclusion

Despite the conventional telling of the Sarris-Kael debate, their debate did not end with the publication of “Circles and Squares,” nor were they the only two contributors. In the same issue of Film Culture where Sarris’s “Notes” appeared, Manny Farber published his own defense of Hollywood’s B movie auteurs in “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Arm.” In the following issue, Sarris’s preliminary pantheon of directors was published. Meanwhile in Film Quarterly Sarris published a reply to Kael, “The Auteur Theory and the Perils of Pauline,” to which Kael replied with “Criticism and Kids’ Games.” The editors of Film Quarterly also responded to Sarris’s critique, while Ian A. Cameron, Mark Shivas, Paul Mayersberg and V. F. Perkins, the editors of the British journal Movie, defended auteurism against Kael. At the end of the decade, Sarris published yet another salvo in his book-length The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968.[66] And, as addressed above, debates about auteurism raged throughout the ’60s in the UK and France, though rarely in this form of two competing romanticisms.

Indeed, following these readings of “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” and “Circles and Squares,” one way of describing this moment in the history of classical film theory is as a debate between the romantic as expressive and the romantic as original. Sarris wants to mine the depths of cinema history for gems in the form of films that went underappreciated in their time, using this excavation as a form of aesthetic education wherein we become more responsive to the minor and the personal. Kael wants to cast a much wider net, willing to leave the past in the past and find new artists who expand our responsiveness to the diversity of originality that cinema is capable of. Sarris saw the establishment of a canon of great films and filmmakers who show us new possibilities for what cinema can be as key to his auteur theory, generating tools for both learning from genius and developing a capacity to identify it in previously ignored places. Kael’s romanticism on the other hand was more broadly targeted at what trust we have or lack in our own aesthetic responsiveness, finding hopes for easy answers to what to think about art to be anathema to aesthetic experience. Constitutionally, I find myself drawn to Sarris’s approach, enjoying the task of learning to appreciate the forgotten more than the searching out of the original and the new, but taking this approach to Kael leaves me entirely convinced that both visions of criticism and cinephilia are necessary. I have colleagues and friends who I value precisely because they fall closer to Kael on this debate than I do and help me expand my horizons in one direction even as my own studies expand them in the other. In both cases, the value of film criticism is tethered to finding and sharing what the critic valued, a valuation that was ultimately self-justifying, justified by nothing more than the critic’s ability to make that value legible to the reader. This is a romantic vision of criticism in the terms laid out by Rorty and Cavell, where the imagination takes precedence over reason and the question of what you value takes precedence over already established criteria of legitimation.

It is common practice in introductory film studies courses to have to move students from questions of evaluation to those of description and interpretation, getting them from the subjective terrain of whether they liked a film to a more objective terrain of what the film is doing, irrespective of how they feel about it. I understand the purpose of this move pedagogically, but ultimately I think it teaches bad habits of subsuming questions of value and our attachments to the realm of provability. Taking Sarris and Kael to be doing a kind of classical film theory provides a strong case for recentering the value of valuing in our teaching, of emphasizing to students that they are engaged not merely in fact finding but in finding something worth saying that is, more importantly, something they want to say, something they want to share because it matters to them. In other words, the revaluation a return to Sarris and Kael gives us is teaching us the value of value in humanistic research. What I hope this unpacking of a particularly fraught moment in the history of film criticism does is show that there is a language of romanticism that has been lost in scholarship on cinema. If we take this period as one of debates internal to classical film theory, asking questions about what we value and why we should value it, perhaps our scholarship and criticism can find new ways to ask and answer those questions for ourselves today.

endnotes

1. James Morrison, Auteur Theory and My Son John (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 63. ↩

2. D.N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 74–75. ↩

3. Ibid., 72. ↩

4. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism and Romanticism” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 105. ↩

5. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9. ↩

6. Alongside “Circles and Squares,” Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” are taught as the challenges to authorship study which killed auteurism by the end of the 1960s. ↩

7. James Morrison, Auteur Theory and My Son John (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 4. ↩

8. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 145. ↩

9. Ibid., 145, 61 ↩

10. Ibid., 64, 62. ↩

11. Ibid., 72. ↩

12. John Caughie, Theories of Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), 125. ↩

13. Ibid. ↩

14. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 103. What Bordwell identifies here is the strange way that, despite news of the author’s death, major film publishers continue to publish monographs and collections focused on individual film directors. For instance, the Directors Cuts series from Illinois University Press and the Contemporary Directors series from Wallflower press. Bordwell’s story in Making Meaning is also part of a long counter-history of the place of authorship in film study, which would also include Richard Dyer’s Stars, Jeff Menne’s Post-Fordist Cinema, and Virginia Wright Wexman’s Hollywood’s Artists. ↩

15. Chris Dumas, Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible (London: Intellect Books, 2012), 4. ↩

16. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 15. ↩

17. Ibid. ↩

18. Other important works in this regard include Richard Dyer’s Stars (London: BFI, 1979), Timothy Corrigan’s A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), and Colin McCabe’s The Eloquence of the Vulgar (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). McCabe’s is the only one that really wrestles with holding on to the mode of aesthetic valuation I am interested in in this article. ↩

19. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 25. It is also worth pointing out here that romanticism is not entirely alien to Bordwell’s cinematic attachments, particularly in reference to Sarris. For more, see his blog post eulogizing Sarris following his passing in 2012, David Bordwell, “Octave’s hop: Andrew Sarris,” Observations on film art (blog), June 24, 2012, https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/06/24/octaves-hop-andrew-sarris". ↩

20. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 27. ↩

21. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 193. ↩

22. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 117. ↩

23. Dana Polan, “Auteur Desire,” Screening the Past, March 1, 2001, http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-12-first-release/auteur-desire". ↩

24. Ibid. ↩

25. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say, 312.  ↩

26. The same excerpt is also anthologized in John Caughie’s Theories of Authorship and P. Adams Sitney’s Film Culture Reader.  ↩

27. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27, (Winter 1962/1963): 1. ↩

28. Ibid., 1–2. ↩

29. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory, 78. ↩

30. Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” 2. ↩

31. It is also roughly the same complaint Felski made in The Limits of Critique.  ↩

32. Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” 2. ↩

33. Ibid., 5. ↩

34. Ibid., 3–4. ↩

35. Ibid., 6. ↩

36. Ibid., 7. ↩

37. Pauline Kael, “Circles and Squares,” Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 15. ↩

38. Rorty, 108–9. ↩

39. Craig Saper, “Artificial Auteurism and the Political Economy of the Allen Smithee case” in Directed by Allen Smithee (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 34. ↩

40. Rorty, 107. ↩

41. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (New York: Dutton Press, 1968). ↩

42. Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” 7. ↩

43. Morrison, Auteur Theory and My Son, 63. ↩

44. Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” 7. ↩

45. Ibid., 21. ↩

46. Morrison, Auteur Theory and My Son John, 66. ↩

47. Ibid. ↩

48. Ibid., 71. ↩

49. Kael, “Circles and Squares,” 14. ↩

50. Ibid., 21. ↩

51. Ibid. ↩

52. Ibid., 16. ↩

53. Ibid., 15. ↩

54. Ibid. ↩

55. Ibid., 21. ↩

56. Ibid., 22. ↩

57. Though, given Kael’s ethnographic concerns, she certainly shares much with Rorty’s naturalist pragmatism as well. ↩

58. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 9. ↩

59. Ibid., 26, 9. ↩

60. Kael, “Circles and Squares,” 22. ↩

61. Ibid. ↩

62. Ibid., 23. ↩

63. Ibid., 24. ↩

64. Sarris, The American Cinema, 26; Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1970,” Film Comment 6.4, (Fall 1970): 7. ↩

65. Kael, “Circles and Squares,” 18. ↩

66. Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton Press, 1968). ↩