Nowadays the Cahiers du Cinema critics' "Auteur Theory"-basically that most movies, the product of many hands, actually have a primary author, which is usually the director-is accepted pretty much unilaterally. So prevalent is it, that even major movie studios, usually the last holdouts against popular change, hire certain directors to be auteurs. Of course there are still many pictures here and everywhere that are more produced-or just coralled into being-than directed, but what one can't deny is that from the inception of film many bold directors have exercised an authorial hand over the proceedings, and stamped their names irrevocably upon a film. We all know, for instance, who Steven Spielberg is, and we can probably summon up images in our heads of E.T. or JAWS or maybe even SCHINDLER'S LIST. Though perhaps very few of us might have recognized his imprint on the episodes of Columbo he directed. I would bet many young fans of action movies might know who Michael Bay is-probably many fans could describe for you the peculiar authorial traits Bay brings to his films (in his case no great compliment to a motion picture, or its target audience).
For those of you who, like me, end up "reading" a lot of movies, you might recognize the authorship of some famous names: Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, or Michaelangelo Antonioni, for example. And there's a great deal of critical work out there which lays plain the auteur traits of these directors and more. There are autobiographies and critical analysis of Bergman, of Luis Bunuel, production style and subject analysis of the traits of directors like Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, even loving treatises to some of the greatest filmmakers, from Jean Renoir to Kenji Mizoguchi. There are comprehensive genre analyses that group great names together: the westerns of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher; the noir films of Nicholas Ray, Jules Dassin, Robert Wise, Jacques Tourner; horror film fans have made a cottage industry out of identifying and illuminating their patron saints, from John Carpenter to Terry Fisher, James Whale to Wes Craven. There's more names than you can shake a stick at.
Still, a lot of names fall through the cracks. As it happens, a good 15 of my favorite directors-wonderful, distinctive auteurs, all of them-sit in critical neglect, missing vital works of criticism and analysis, biographies and retrospective celebrations. Many of these are just now beginning to slip into critical consciousness, but some have yet to be properly illuminated for their special talents and for their particular voices.
In my next few posts I'm going to focus on a group of five directors; vivid auteurs, who everyone ought to know as well as Steven Spielberg. Hopefully, when this is through, you'll know them better than you know the work of Spielberg or Lucas or Michael Bay, or John Hughes.
Here are the five: Robert Altman, King Hu, Jean-Pierre Melville, Seijun Suzuki, Johnnie To.They have unity as a group in that they all might be called filmic formalists. Each of them deal in diverse genres of filmmaking (significantly three of them made a more permanent home in crime pictures, a longtime haven for formal abstraction in the cinema) and in every instance the genre is bent to accommodate the special concerns of the author. This might be said to be true of many auteur filmmakers-Ingmar Bergman, for example, was often said to be making horror pictures that were nonetheless inescapably Bergman-but formalists are somewhat different. While many auteurs are identified by a set of habits and concerns, like Bergman's obsessions with personal suffering and agnosticism, or Antonioni's intellectual despair of human communication, formalists are more closely associated with a style. In the case of each of these directors, it is a deeply personal and codified style that is present in all their pictures (certain allowances being made for Johnnie To, whose auteur voice emerged freakishly in the middle of his ongoing career), and it is this style that is the source both of their auteur status and their critical neglect. In each case the filmmaker is treated as a minor figure, or a willful maverick outside the realm of meaningful moviemaking. Nothing further from the truth. So in these articles I'll attempt to prove, through analysis and enthusiasm, the quintessential merits of a series of abstract formalists: the stripped-down crime methodologies of Melville, which melt upon analysis into existential frescoes; King Hu's writhing labyrinths of struggle; Seijun Suzuki's subsumed narratives and absurdist interior monologues. Each of these picture-makers is a relevant artist, and all of their pictures are a whomping good time. I hope you see some of the pictures I'll mention, and I hope you enjoy the writing.
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