The Limits of Auteurism

Nicholas Godfrey

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813589169
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 1970s has become one of the most romanticized periods in motion picture history, celebrated for its stylistic boldness, thematic complexity, and the unshackling of directorial ambition. The Limits of Auteurism aims to challenge many of these assumptions. Beginning with the commercial success of Easy Rider in 1969, and ending two years later with the critical and commercial failure of that film’s twin progeny, The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, Nicholas Godfrey surveys a key moment that defined the subsequent aesthetic parameters of American commercial art cinema.  The book explores the role that contemporary critics played in determining how the movies of this period were understood and how, in turn, strategies of distribution influenced critical responses and dictated the conditions of entry into the rapidly codifying New Hollywood canon. Focusing on a small number of industrially significant films, this new history advances our understanding of this important moment of transition from Classical to contemporary modes of production.  
 

1 • Which New Hollywood?

The inability of the conventional, retrospectively enshrined New Hollywood model (1967–1977) to simultaneously accommodate such diverse films as The Last Movie, Fiddler on the Roof, Shaft, and Dirty Harry suggests that the state of Hollywood’s industry in the early 1970s was significantly more complex than currently accepted, reductive models indicate. As Steve Neale points out, most writings on films of this period focus on a specific, canonically enshrined body of films, at the expense of the wider field of films released by the major motion picture distributors during the same period, thus producing, “a partial and misleading picture of the American film industry, its output and its audiences in the 1960s and early 1970s.”1 In an attempt to avoid perpetuating the same kinds of privileged cinematic canons, I focus my analysis on two of the more readily identifiable film cycles of the period, defined by clear iconography, coherent generic trappings, and similar production and distribution practices.

Despite the purported stylistic and thematic radicalism of the canonically enshrined New Hollywood films, very few of them accurately reflect the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The typical New Hollywood canon privileges a limited brand of white, male, heterosexual orthodoxy that closely mirrors the makeup of the studios’ boardrooms at the time. Typically, these films resolutely avoid seriously engaging with the cultural movements of the moment. This seeps into the historical commentary on the period as well; films that attempted to depict more diverse subject matter and thematic concerns, such as the concurrent blaxploitation cycle, and the rare auteurist titles with women-centric themes, were typically twice marginalized, first by contemporary critics, then again by historians. For the most part, the lack of diversity visible in the conventionally historicized New Hollywood canon belies the status of these films as mass entertainment, produced by the industrial apparatus of the dominant culture, and this extends across every line of production. For example, even within the confines of the blaxploitation cycle, the overwhelming majority of production power was consolidated around established white producers, with rare exceptions, such as early independent producer/director Melvin Van Peebles. Renee Ward’s survey of fifty-three blaxploitation titles produced between January 1973 and August 1974 reveals only six titles with African American producers.2 This cycle found its foothold with the commercial success of Shaft in 1971, while the success of the kung fu films The Big Boss/Fists of Fury (dir. Lo Wei, Golden Harvest, 1971), Fist of Fury/The Chinese Connection/The Iron Hand (dir. Lo Wei, National General Pictures, 1972), and King Boxer/Five Fingers of Death (dir. Chang-hwa Chung, Warner Bros., 1972) in the United States led Hollywood to co-opt the genre in the form of Enter the Dragon (dir. Robert Clouse, Warner Bros., 1973). These cycles have been widely covered elsewhere but are rarely discussed in relation to New Hollywood. Both blaxploitation and kung fu are treated as marginal cinemas, both racially and within the hierarchy of aesthetic taste. Sundiata K. Cha-Jua attributes the success of kung fu films in the United States to the presence of nonwhite protagonists, which he believes appealed heavily to a cinematically marginalized black domestic audience.3 While the production and distribution imperatives that spawned the blaxploitation and kung fu cycles seemingly point to an acknowledgment of the fragmentation of film audiences, the widespread financial success of both Shaft and Enter the Dragon actually indicates the continued existence of an undifferentiated mass audience; part of the same mass audience also turned out in droves for Easy Rider.

During the same period Elaine May (The Heartbreak Kid [Twentieth Century Fox, 1972]), Joan Micklin Silver (Hes ter Street [Midwest Films, 1975]), and Claudia Weill (Girlfriends [Warner Bros., 1978]) forged directorial careers that remain tangential to conventional accounts of the New Hollywood. The title of Weill’s It’s My Turn (Columbia Pictures, 1980) now marks a bitterly ironic punctuation point to her feature film career, as she subsequently transitioned into television direction, where she remains. Similarly marginal to the established New Hollywood canon are the women-centric films of Paul Mazursky, while Carole Eastman, Marcia Lucas, and Polly Platt made distinctive contributions to ongoing creative partnerships with more celebrated male auteurs. The presence of all these women suggests alternative configurations of film authorship that move beyond reductive, director-centric approaches to auteurism. At the decade’s end James Monaco considered this topic in “Summing Up the Seventies: Women: The Industry” for American Film, noting the rise of women at the studio executive level and producers such as Julia Phillips. Intriguingly, Monaco posited Barbra Streisand as a major film author of the period, given her presence at the top of the annual box-office charts throughout the decade and the unprecedented degree of creative control that she wielded over her projects. Monaco lamented that “our view of the development of female talent in the Hollywood establishment during the seventies has been somewhat distorted by focusing on the role of director to the exclusion of the other members of the movie team.”4 In a despairing rejoinder to notions of progress toward equality, Monaco concluded by noting that “there were as many women writing films in the thirties or fifties.”5 It is abundantly clear that the number of superstar directors forged during the New Hollywood period heavily outweighs the number of superstar screenwriters, Robert Towne and Paul Schrader being rare exceptions to the rule, with even fewer women in either category. If the myth of the American auteur is the ultimate cultural legacy of the New Hollywood, it is cast in a distinctly masculine mold, despite the presence of several influential women critics working throughout the period, including Pauline Kael, Renata Adler, Judith Crist, and Molly Haskell.

This kind of canonical instability extends to broader conceptions of the New Hollywood canon. When coming to grips with the films of this era, a persistent dilemma facing film scholars is the lack of a universally accepted definition of which years the New Hollywood period spanned, which films it encompassed, or indeed, if a New Hollywood ever existed at all. A definition of what, precisely, “New Hollywood” refers to is far from fixed and is further problematized by its occasional interchangeability with “American Renaissance” and “Hollywood Renaissance.” The conventional account of the New Hollywood, as laid out by such figures as Peter Biskind, David A. Cook, David Thomson, and more recently, Mark Harris, posits a continuous, decade-spanning New Hollywood period (1967–1977).6 Confusingly, Peter Krämer indicates that many more critics, including Andrew Britton, James Monaco, Steve Neale, Thomas Schatz, and Justin Wyatt, use “New Hollywood” to refer to the blockbuster mode of production that emerged following the success of Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1975) and Star Wars to refer to the dominant mode of production from the late 1970s to the present day.7 Under this model, everyone from Tony Scott to Michael Bay could be viewed as a New Hollywood director, despite the fact that even the most adventurous of critics would be hard pressed to locate any similarities (stylistically, generically, industrially) between the works of those filmmakers and the films commonly situated under Biskind’s 1967–1977 New Hollywood umbrella. For the sake of this book, my use of “New Hollywood” aligns with the Biskind and the other writers listed with him above, but with an acknowledgment of the tenuousness of its history of usage.

Both New Hollywood camps have in common an unwillingness to combine industrial/historical and formal analysis (what David Bordwell and Noël Carroll term “middle-level research”) to begin grouping the films of the period into a more meaningful, concrete historical model that moves beyond such arbitrary and vague categorizations as New Hollywood or American Renaissance.8 Thomas Elsaesser’s influential early consideration of the period, “The Pathos of Failure: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero,” published in Monogram in 1975, suggests that New Hollywood might represent a kind of termination point for the Classical Hollywood cinema.9 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson define the central characteristics of Classical Hollywood cinema as clarity of storytelling, continuity editing, mutability of meaning, and the presence of goal-based protagonists and narratives.10 The stylistic mode of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s Classical Hollywood is typically occupied with imparting narrative information as efficiently as possible while maintaining clearly delineated spatial relationships, without unnecessarily drawing attention to its own formal mechanisms. In opposition to this, Robert Phillip Kolker proposes that the New Hollywood film “refus[es] the classical American approach to film, which is to make the formal structure of a work erase itself as it creates its content. . . . [New Hollywood] directors delight in making us aware of the fact that it is film we are watching, an artifice, something made in special ways, to be perceived in special ways.”11

The role that critics have played in identifying the foregrounding of cinematic style in the New Hollywood as we now know it should not be underestimated, regardless of the industrial reality. Investigating the origins of this concept necessitates navigating a number of distinct theoretical bodies and historical time lines. In a chronological sense, writings on the New Hollywood can generally be divided into three categories. The first is first-generation criticism, typified by the writings of Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Vincent Canby, Joseph Morgenstern, and Manny Farber in the 1960s and 1970s. Second is auterist/aesthetic histories that tend to focus on the careers of individual directors. Joseph Gelmis’s The Film Director as Superstar (1971), Diane Jacobs’s Hollywood Renaissance (1977), and Michael Pye and Lynda Myles’s The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (1979) are three early examples of this category. The third category includes industry-spanning historical accounts, the most detailed and wide-ranging of which is David A. Cook’s Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam (2000).12

Looking at the first-generation criticism, it is interesting to trace where the concept of a New Hollywood first emerged. Pauline Kael, reviewing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (dir. George Roy Hill, Twentieth Century Fox, 1969), perceived that a major shift was under way, writing that “movies and, even more, movie audiences have been changing. The art houses are now (for the first time) dominated by American movies, and the young audiences waiting outside, sitting on the sidewalk or standing in line, are no longer waiting just for entertainment.”13 However, in the same review Kael expressed cynicism about the commercial motivations underlying this new cinema and also lamented its belatedness: “[W]e all know how the industry men think: they’re going to try to make ‘now’ movies when now is already then.”14

A mainstream critic, Kael was alert to a shift in audience composition and the studios’ attempts to cater to the tastes of the newly consolidated youth audience. This contrasts starkly with what was occurring in the upper intellectual echelons of US film publication in the same period, as academic cinema journals paid remarkably little attention to the nascent new wave playing out in the commercial cinemas of the nation. Throughout the early 1970s Film Comment, for example, focused predominantly on contemporary foreign cinema, historical appraisals of directors from Hollywood’s golden era, and a general elevation of “canonical” figures at the expense of any lengthy consideration of the current state of the American cinema.15 In 1971 Film Comment ran extensive articles on Bernardo Bertolucci, Yasujiro Ozu, Francois Truffaut, F. W. Murnau, Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, and John Ford. The following year Paul Schrader penned a piece on what by 1972 was already one of the most widely discussed film genres, with “Notes on Film Noir” appearing in the spring issue alongside articles on George Cukor, Dziga Vertov, and, in a notable exception to the dominant tendency, Klute (dir. Alan J. Pakula, Warner Bros., 1971).16

By mid-decade writing on film was beginning to shift. In March 1976 Schrader himself occupied the magazine’s cover for Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, Columbia Pictures, 1976), and in September 1978 the troublesome classification reared its head, as Film Comment’s cover story offered “studies of three major directors in the New Hollywood.”17 The three directors in question were Robert Altman, Larry Cohen, and Terrence Malick. The fact that the films of Larry Cohen have subsequently been revised out of all but the most obscurantist recollections of the New Hollywood demonstrates the inherent instability and volatility of any cinematic canon. As one of the most stylistically atypical directors of the period, Robert Altman had not enjoyed commercial and critical success since Nashville (Paramount Pictures, 1975), and even in his period of critical vogue, the commercially successful M*A*S*H (Twentieth Century Fox, 1970) was followed by Brewster McCloud (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970), which left critics and audiences alike nonplussed. By 1978 Altman was rapidly falling out of favor with studios, critics, and the box office in equal measure. In the 1980s he returned to working in television, where his career had begun. Similarly, Malick disappeared from view altogether for twenty years after the release of Days of Heaven (Paramount Pictures, 1978).

More broadly speaking, given that retrospective conventional wisdom dictates that by 1978 the New Hollywood moment had passed, Film Comment’s showcase seems fundamentally mistimed, suggesting that for the custodians of high-brow cinephilia at the magazine, the historical moment could only begin to be observed from the point of its decline.18 In the Biskind-approved chronology of the period, 1978 marked the end of the creative freedoms that enabled the defining films of the period, the death knell struck by the troubled production, budgetary excesses, and commercial failure of such large-scale auterist projects as New York, New York (dir. Martin Scorsese, United Artists, 1977), Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, United Artists, 1979), and Heaven’s Gate (dir. Michael Cimino, United Artists, 1980).

Film Comment’s long affiliation with Schrader indicates a more interesting schism within the New Hollywood group of filmmakers. Schrader, born in 1946, is significantly younger than the group of directors who came to prominence during the first five years of the canonically enshrined New Hollywood period: for example, Arthur Penn was born in 1922, Sidney Lumet in 1924, S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: Open Roads
• 1. Which New Hollywood?
• 2. Easy Rider
• Part I: Variations on a Theme: Five Easy Riders
• Part II: Politicizing Genre
• Part III: The Limits of Auteurism
• Acknowledgments
• Filmography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index