Independent Filmmaking as PERSONAL IDENTITY FILMMAKING
& Since Documentary has become the New Independent Filmmaking (Part 1 of 2.)
Click here for: Independent Filmmaking as PERSONAL IDENTITY FILMMAKING & Since Documentary has become the New Independent Filmmaking (Part 2 of 2.)
(NOTE: This essay on Independent Filmmaking was written on November 14, 2019, so before COVID-19, but the message stands even stronger now. It will be published in April, 2020. All Rights Reserved)
The Auteur: An Independent Filmmakers Publication
The Auteur: An Independent Filmmakers Publication, to be launched shortly on Medium at medium.com/@theauteur, will be a Film Theory & Film Criticism Publication by Film Organization The Auteur.
The investigation into the State of Independent Filmmaking, and the fact that it is still relevant as an Art Form today, is the main reason why I am launching my Film Publication The Auteur.
I’d like to contribute a few potential solutions to ensure its’ survival.
About the word AUTEUR
“The politique des auteurs consists, in short, of choosing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of reference, and then assuming that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next. It is recognized that there do exist certain important films of quality that escape this test, but these will systematically be considered inferior to those in which the personal stamp of the auteur, however run-of-the-mill the scenario, can be perceived even minutely.”
Andre Bazin
The word Auteur seems to have a very negative connotation in the US in particular, as do the words Artist and Cinema to some extent, and all exist in fairly close proximation to each other, and all three are incidentally French words. So maybe an underlying anti-French sentiment has something to do with it, the perceived notion in the US in particular that the French are both snobbish and intellectual. Because these seem to be the underlying issues with the word.
The word has been accused of sounding pretentious but in a country that is so insistent on being monolingual, and that language being English, any other language could potentially sound pretentious, simply because it can be intimidating to people who speak one language and who are used to hearing primarily one language, to hear words in another language, and not in the least because they would not understand the words’ meanings of course. To hear someone speak another language could imply they might speak about you and you wouldn’t know it, and so your life could be in danger, something the US government likes to play on in general, fear of foreigners.
I have seen the word Auteur described as a surefire red flag for pretentiousness in an English language article, and that is just the word Auteur alone, which again means only Author in French. People have written the word Auteur off as sounding and implying selfishness, as if having an idea and executing it is in and of itself negative somehow. They have accused it of implying a certain kind of control that is necessarily negative.
But they would probably not accuse the word Writer of having those same exact connotations, or Director, or Architect, Teacher, Doctor, Manager or Driver. They have accused the word Auteur of sounding and being misogynist in nature but again would not necessarily as easily say that about these other words. I have never heard a single complaint about the word doctor, even if I’ve heard many complains about male doctors by primarily women, and the medical field has historically long been controlled by primarily men. But the word Auteur in and of itself is no more or less sexist than the word doctor.
And lastly it has by some been interpreted as meaning white, racially, but again, it is a French word, and the word only means Author.
So it seems to me there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the US about the word Auteur, and this seems to stem not from any concrete facts of it being negative in reality but rather that the word has no clearcut meaning in a country that understands film as entertainment and not art.
(Just like there is in 2019 a public dispute going on about what is cinema, and certain younger directors implying that American superhero movies fall under the word cinema, with some even implying the words cinema and movies are synonymous. But this is a whole subject in and of itself.)
There are at least Three Reasons, besides lingual, for this misunderstanding.
Number One, the US does not have the same cultural history as Europe and does not truly recognize cinema as a French invention, so cannot recognize it as simply a technological invention and continuation of other art forms, like still photography, painting, literature, theater, etc.
Those were considered fairly high brow art forms by America and were not historically indulged in. Film entered the US in that intellectual void and so collectively seemed like an almost sudden curiosity, something simple and entertaining, and so for the masses to understand and consume, a low art.
But Film in Europe was see just the latest addition to many previously developed art forms, and as the most complex technological advancement, and able to represent an almost complete human experience in this particular art form of film, film mirroring life quite successfully that is. It was appreciated and became used for culturally different reasons in Europe, not because it was easily digestible by illiterate people, like in the US, but because it represented something like life itself. The artists in Europe recognized its’ creative possibilities fairly early on, but the producers and investors in the US recognized its’ financial and controlling possibilities fairly early on.
And it was therefore extremely popular in Europe as well, even if not completely initially anticipated and also not “cashed in on” as the US soon would do, and shift the film industry away from France, where it was born in the late 1800s, and to the US in the early 1900s, East Coast first, and finally Hollywood, California, where it has dominated the international box office by far ever since.
Number Two, because the US does not have Europe’s lengthy and complex cultural history and went in almost full production mode since the Pilgrims arrived on Native American land, and applied this to absolutely everything, it also applied this to film, and so film simply became another business in the US.
Filmmaking in no time became a matter of mass production in the US, of factory-like studios, with different, specialized departments to ensure quantity mainly, lots of films, made fast, fairly cheap, and as many as possible, and necessarily fairly simple in nature because of this process.
In the US in particular the writer and the director also got separated by this production-like process, and Hollywood somehow divided the creative and financial power as being the lowest for the originator of the film, the writer, and creatively the highest for the director of the film.
And anyone outside, and sometimes even inside the US film industry, seems to forget how much actual power the producers or the investors have in this filmmaking process.
So therefore two entirely irrelevant complaints about the Auteur Theory even seemed to pop up, specifically in the US, that on the one hand it gives too much control to the director and dismisses the writer, and on the other that it falsely assumes that the director is in absolute control over the film’s final vision, while the producers and investors have way more control in reality.
But the writer being under-credited and the director in a sense being over-credited, and not acknowledging the invisible control of power and money that the producers and investors have neither, is a problem of the Hollywood way of filmmaking specifically, and not of Auteurism at all.
As a matter of fact, before the French film critics were praising certain American directors within the Hollywood system as possessing auteur-like qualities as sole visionaries of a film, Hollywood credited a film mostly to the Studios itself. It was the French who put the director on the map to begin with. They just couldn’t convince the US to see the writer the same way, and didn’t consider that the US necessarily saw the writer and director as two different people of course.
Auteurism was started in France by a small group of artists, of filmmakers who were also film critics. They were the writers and filmmakers and often the producers of their owns films, and were able to do so by being creatively inventive, keeping stories personal and realistic, and keeping the budgets low, and therefore these arguments about a division of creative and financial control do not apply to the original Auteur Theory.
And Number Three, because the US started as a nation of settlers and colonialists on the one hand and immigrants and slaves on the other, and it raced against time to make it the most powerful nation in the world, it had to communicate things simple and quickly, and this was done primarily through symbols and visuals, as is custom in preliterate civilizations. And the US government, as many governments, have also realized the power of visuals and symbolic meanings on regular people.
In other words, in many parts of Europe regular people, the not wealthy and noble in times of royalty and military dictatorships and religious wars, slowly became literate and to some extent philosophical, intellectual, through religious scriptures first but of other philosophical and intellectual ideas eventually. In Europe the different classes had more time to develop, even if they were controlled and set back in their developments. And they developed a keenness for leisure time, for sitting around and conversing, exchanging ideas over food and drinks.
The US developed differently culturally and rushed through many developments because of it’ particular time and place in history, at the cusp of the industrial revolution.
And these three developments created a fundamental misunderstanding of the word Auteur, the role of the Auteur, and the role of Film as Art itself.
So I hereby reclaim the word Auteur for solely positive and practical and creative purposes.
I use the word AUTEUR because it is the closest word that I can think of to imply that a creative work should ideally stem from a singular vision. A singular vision does not even mean necessarily coming from a single person but more often than not this is the case, and I think that is a good thing. Because it somehow also implies that for one person this vision is very important, and maybe because it might be personal and somehow real to that person.
If a group were to truly have a singular vision it could be very interesting but chances are that when a group of creatives or anyone else come together they could at best share similarities but a truly singular vision between a group of people is hard to accomplish, and most likely some people in the group would still end up leading the others in this vision somehow.
Many people would argue that filmmaking is a collaborative art but most people have not questioned or argued the importance of a director in charge. Building a house is a collaborative undertaking as well but no one would argue the presence of an architect in charge and a blueprint of the house.
And some people would argue that the director is indeed in charge of a film completely but those people do not consider that most likely the money required to make a film is not coming from the director themselves and so this would put the director and everyone else working for them automatically at the mercy of the people funding the project.
And most people would not carefully consider that the word Auteur is simply French for Author, and has no other sort of egomaniacal of meaning. Most people would not consider carefully that in France and Europe at large, and by extension the world over, film is still largely perceived as a form of art, whereas in the US it is primarily a form of entertainment.
Thank you for reading,
The Auteur: An Independent Filmmakers Publication
The Auteur will launch shortly as a Los Angeles-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit Film Organization (2020)
Brief Bio
