Main Characteristics of The American Film Industry

As cinema evolved in the 20th century, so did what it represented: shifts in what made essentially made a film “distinctive” gave way to different kinds of theories that described it, and helped made cinema what it is today. But perhaps the most intuitive of these theories was one developed in the 1950s: auteur theory, or the theory that films are distinct pieces of art made in the vision of their director (or therefore, their artist), was born out of Cahiers du Cinéma, a film magazine founded in France in 1951. Popular contributors included Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who, being widely known for their works in the French new wave, were considered auteurs themselves, and thus auteur theory remained for several years a theory largely associated with French cinema. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that auteur theory extended beyond the limitations of Europe: an American film critic by the name of Andrew Sarris published Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962 in (you guessed it) 1962, bringing auteur theory just a step closer to Hollywood, and consequently, the mainstream.

Robert W. Welkos of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Sarris in 1996, asking him to describe what it was like introducing auteur theory to an American audience. Said Sarris, “My original article was not a defense of the auteur theory, it was a discussion.” Welkos himself notes how difficult it was to get people on board with it: he interviewed Rick Jewell, the then-associate dean of the University of Southern California, who said, “People were looking for a way to convince college administrators that movies were worth studying at universities” (Welkos, In Theory). Coincidentally, the New Hollywood generation of directors (Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, etc.) were all in film school in the ‘60s, thus begging the question: do we owe it auteur theory for introducing a band of renowned (and still widely influential) filmmakers, and, as a result, are they auteurs themselves?

Sarris would say so. In his introduction of Notes on the Auteur Theory, Sarris attempts to define auteur theory. Sarris quotes from Ian Cameron’s “Films, Directors, and Critics”, who wrote, “[The] director is the author of a film, the person who gives it any distinctive quality” (Sarris, Notes). While Sarris treats this definition as one of many (as if, suitably, he was theorizing about a theory), Cameron’s definition seems to describe the New Hollwood filmmakers. Martin Scorsese, with his films that are violent, often center on Italian-Americans, and have been mostly set in New York, fits the bill. A “distinctive quality” allows an audience to recognize a filmmaker out of the many in the industry; Scorsese therefore is an auteur, an author, and a prime example of American auteur theory.

What makes Scorsese particularly interesting is how he (and the others listed) aren’t nearly as obscure as the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. While a large number of Americans are familiar with French new wave films, they aren’t exactly mainstream, nor have they ever been. Woody Allen and his films are the opposite: the size of his film catalogue and its use of famous, iconic actors have made his movies accessible and widely known to the American audience. Charles Paul Freund of The Washington Post described Allen in 1992 as the “autobiographical auteur”, with films such as Annie Hall and Manhattan being fictional interpretations of Allen’s life. Annie Hall, perhaps Allen’s most popular film, won four Academy Awards in 1978, including Best Picture. The Academy Awards themselves are well known for awarding accolades to the crème de la crème of that year’s cinema, while at the same time, being widely ingested by the American audience, and even the world: viewership of each year’s Oscars have been steadily on the rise for years, with this past year’s ceremony totaling at 43.7 million views in the United States alone (O’Connell, TV Ratings). Widespread exposure of subjectively “good” films has allowed the average person access to films created by auteurs, and consequently, allowing auteurship to become mainstream.

Of course, that is a manifestation of the 2000s; Woody Allen and his generation of filmmakers came on the scene in the 1970s, just as the likes of their films were only starting to receive recognition from the average person. But as recognition of individualized filmmaking came into play, more often than not, only good films were deemed products of auteur: Andrew Sarris, however, pointed out in 1962 that auteurship could still be found in bad directors, way before the time of Michael Bay and M. Night Shyamalan. Referencing the films of Philippe de Broca and Édouard Molinaro, Sarris writes, “There might be some argument about the relative badness of [their films], but, otherwise, the directors ran true to form by almost any objective criterion of value” (Sarris, Notes). Even famed auteur François Truffaut himself once said, “There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors,” which in itself suggests that if a director has made such an impact on the film industry to be deemed bad or good, that described quality is indicative auteurship (Chaudhuri, Auteur Theory).

There have been bad movies since the beginning of filmmaking, but at a time when making a movie was considerably more difficult to do than in the 21st century, early films in the first half of the 1900s tended to only be remembered and exposed to future generations when they were good. With the onset of the Internet and the ability to access a film in multiple mediums, the film industry has reached a point where it can cater to a wide variety of audiences. Action movies tend to lack depth to their stories, but their special effects and gimmicks can be associated with such directors as Michael Bay, who, despite the flaws of his films, has impacted the industry in such a way that his movies can easily be identified and earn him the designation of an auteur. Auteurship in Hollywood has become so different from the original visions of the writers of Cahiers du Cinéma and even Andrew Sarris that it might as well be separate from its original definition. American auteurship doesn’t necessarily need to consider the quality of a film, and if so, does that then make it a bad thing?

In Robert W. Welkos’s 1996 interview with Andrew Sarris, Sarris said his original 1962 article was not a product of a goal. Said Sarris, “I wasn’t interested in pushing one craft over another. I argued that many of the American directors who had been underrated were just as good as the art-house directors from abroad and that the best American films are generally genre films” (Welkos, In Theory). Sarris elaborated that genre films - which in themselves are so distinctly American - were the one thing that made them very different from the works of many European directors. Genre films have transformed in such a way that if the movie isn’t even all that good, at least its saving factor can be how its genre makes up the movie. A sci-fi film with depthless characters and a rocky plot can be saved by awesome special effects and intuitive additions to the genre. One film that comes to mind is Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Interstellar, which peaked only at 74% on Rotten Tomatoes despite expectation hoping it would be 2014‘s best film. Writes David Denby of the New Yorker, “Interstellar, a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy you saw it” (Denby, “Love and Physics”). The film received reviews that varied from appraisal to disdain, but many the reviewer noted the classic Christopher Nolan touch seen in the Dark Knight trilogy and Inception. While Interstellar might not have been a “good” genre film - if genre films are characteristic of American auteurship - it the very least still qualifies to further Christopher Nolan as an auteur if it still has the confusing, yet distinctive qualities of the kind of films he’s known to make.

Auteurship in Hollywood is different from auteurship in Europe; that we’ve established. And it is so unique, so complex, that it is still hard to define what American auteurship truly is: if it’s a genre film, is the director not an auteur if it’s bad? And does the film catalogue of a single director must be consistent in order to declare them an auteur? Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born director of such films as Brokebacl Mountain and Life of Pi, has such a varied filmography that his style could hardly be called consistent. Yet the efforts he puts into his movies result in quality entertainment. Perhaps a director who puts such hard work into their movies truly encompasses the traditional notion of achieving the “American Dream”, and that American auteurship is simply a branch of that.

Writes Andrew Sarris in Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, “The three premises of the auteur theory may be visualized as three concentric circles: the outer circle as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning. The corresponding roles of the director may be designated as those of a technician, a stylist, and an auteur. There is no prescribed course by which a director passes through the three circles” (Sarris, Notes). Throughout his article, Sarris makes it very clear that there is no specific definition for auteurship; as he suggests here, an auteur is not always necessarily the director, either. Quentin Tarantino, for example, is a director known for his outlandish action films that incorporate elements of film noir and Westerns, but he himself credits the success of his films to his editor, Sally Menke. Following her death in 2010, Tarantino told The Huffington Post, how, when it came to putting the final touches in one of his films Menke “would take one step forward and I would take one tiny step back. And she’d kind of lead the way” (Ryan, Quentin Tarantino). Other film partnerships, such as director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, or even director Christopher Nolan and composer Hans Zimmer, would be nothing if the directors did not enlist the help of their partners. The distinctive quality of their films - that distinctiveness that essentially makes them auteurs - is not solely created by the directors themselves. In this scenario, American auteurship is not exclusively that of a director, but also a team. It makes sense when one considers the concept of the genre film; whether it be scifi or action or horror, the special effects, the stunts, and extensive research put into these films require more than just one person.

Pinning down what exactly American auteurship is difficult; Andrew Sarris couldn’t quite define it himself in 1962, and fifty-two years later, film has evolved in such a way that goes far beyond the original concept of European auteurship. Perhaps being an auteur is even an outdated concept: the original definition as it appears in Cahiers du Cinéma is more than sixty years old, and since the early 1950s, the film industry has more than doubled in age and changed in so many ways. It can be said that some of its concepts still apply to film - because it was never wrong, and it still isn’t necessarily irrelevant - but one must consider the achievements made in film that could not even be imagined in the mid-20th century. Yet maybe even that’s exactly what auteurship is in Hollywood: the American film industry is so complex, varying from the simplicity of the most obscure art films to blockbuster superhero action films, that perhaps auteurship merely means to never be predictable. And Hollywood is always full of surprises.