The Auteurist's Tears

Abstract

Robert Philip Kolker. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. 395 + xii pp. Richard Maltby. Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983.417 pp. Thomas Allen Nelson. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 268 pp. William Rothman. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.371 pp. That field of critical inquiry into the cinema that bears the name "the auteur theory" is supposed to have been thoroughly uprooted and thrown away, its space in film scholarship seeded with salt, by French theorists and their British followers in the interval between "May '68" and the rise of the critical discourse that lately calls itself post-modernist.1 Of course, we are told, the "auteur theory" was nothing of the sort; it was just an unfortunate name chosen in 1962 by the American film critic Andrew Sarris in order to make the idea clearer to his readers and slapped on the original La politique des auteurs that had served as the "critical policy" of Cahiers du cinema in the period between Francois Truffaut's not-quite-a-manifesto in 1954 and the rise of the French New Wave about five years later. We are also told that Sarris scraped the authenticity off of the French original, its combative posture, when he translated Cahiers'' polemical thrust as a "theory."