An Invention without a Future. James Naremore

studies of genres or audiences. The critical study of authors is no longer a central activity. A great deal of contemporary historiography continues to treat the author in the manner of Foucault, as little more than a discursive function, and this tendency is reinforced by a long tradition of cultural theory, ranging from radicals like Walter Benjamin to conservatives like Daniel Bell, who argue that technology and the mass media systematically undermine the bourgeois values of originality, autonomy, and aestheticism upon which the idea of authorship depends. Each new technical development since the beginning of the century has helped to confirm this theory. In the age of the computer, the media are able to generate “hypertexts,” apparently authorless words, sounds, and images manipulated by the reader/viewer according to structural conventions and a repertoire of older styles. A great many postmodern artists have adopted this strategy; like bricoleurs or samplers, they make new texts out of borrowed or retro motifs, becoming ironic about their originality.

      And yet, as anyone can see from the latest movies, individual style hasn’t gone away and the star director is as visible as ever. Timothy Corrigan has argued that such figures are especially important to the contemporary marketplace because they serve as a “commercial strategy for organizing audience reception . . . bound to distribution and marketing aims that identify and address the potential cult status of an auteur” (103). I agree, although Corrigan seems to me to understate the fact that directors are also artists, and to overstate the difference between the past and the present. Orson Welles was a vastly more important artist than Michael Bay, but he was just as deeply involved in vulgar show business, and the marketing of his early pictures depended heavily on RKO’s ballyhoo about his “genius.” In their own day, Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Capra were publicized no less than Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. What makes the contemporary situation relatively new is the split between Hollywood and an audience of people who read reviews and make discriminations on the basis of directorial names like David Lynch, Sally Potter, and Atom Egoyan. In 1997, Cahiers du cinéma speculated on the question, “What happened to the politique des auteurs?” The journal’s answer: nothing. As proof of an ongoing auteuromorphisme (defined as a persistent desire to make the film resemble the body of its creator), the journal offered interviews with five directors—Pedro Almodóvar, Takeshi Kitano, Alain Resnais, Robert Guédiguian, and Abbas Kiarostami—whose work had just opened in Paris (Baecque, 22–25).

      The academic deemphasis on authors is out of key with this situation, although it offers an important counterweight to the overwhelming emphasis on stars, celebrities, and biographies in the mainstream market. In universities, nothing should prevent author criticism from contributing to our understanding of media history and sociology. French auteurism as a historical movement may be dead (its greatest influence lasted roughly two decades), but so are the tedious debates about the death of the author. The residual “auteur theory” in its various manifestations still affects our view of film history, and it still has lessons to teach us—among them, the three I list below:

      1 The author is just as real (or as illusory and fetishized) as the money and the mechanical apparatus behind the cinema. The classic auteurs such as Hitchcock and Hawks imposed a style upon their films, as do contemporary directors, and any “materialistic” criticism needs to take this fact into account. It’s true that authors are “written by” a series of historical, social, and cultural determinants, and that no author creates a film ex nihilo; but the author doesn’t become less real simply because she’s socially constructed or because she uses the common language and tradition. Critics need to understand the phenomenon of the author dialectically, with an awareness of the complicated, dynamic relationship between movie history, institutions, and artists, and with an appreciation of the aesthetic choices made by individual agents in particular circumstances.

      2 The study of authors is useful because it sometimes enables us to differentiate films more precisely. One can make valid generalizations about Hollywood studios and genres, but every western and every film noir is not the same. As Robin Wood has pointed out, the name “Hitchcock” points to a different nexus of ideological and psychological concerns from the name “Capra.” These two individuals were themselves situated differently in history, and a study of their careers can produce a fine-grained understanding of both film style and the general culture. Echoing a statement by F. R. Leavis, Wood argues that it is “only through the medium of the individual that ideological tensions come into particular focus” (Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 292).

      3 Contrary to what Foucault suggests in his famous essay on the idea of the author, it can be very important for us to know who is speaking. A good deal is at stake, for example, when we view Citizen Kane as an RKO production rather than as a product of Orson Welles’s career; one way of looking at the film makes it seem like a Hollywood classic and the other emphasizes its critical or subversive edge. Of course we can derive a political interpretation from purely internal evidence, avoiding the question of the source altogether. When we do, however, we fail to engage with what Andreas Huyssen calls “the ideology of the subject (as male, white, middle-class),” and we forsake the chance of “developing alternative and different notions of subjectivity” (213). There is no good reason why everyone needs to follow the example of Barthes and Foucault, who, as European male intellectuals, were deeply invested in the attempt to kill off “papa.” Less powerful individuals or groups need authors to help shape their identities. Thus in a recent book on Italian director Elvira Notari, Giuliana Bruno poses a rhetorical question: “Can or should we consider as dead an author, such as the female author, who is yet to be fully established in the public sphere and theorized?” (234; see also Flitterman-Lewis).

      In many cases the study of authors is a conservative activity, bound up with the perpetuation of traditions and the manufacture of commodities. But in certain contexts it can serve as an attack on convention and a form of resistance. The best of the early auteurist criticism had something of this last quality. It was romantic, but it challenged received wisdom; it was ironic, but it never used irony as a defense against popular pleasure; it was subjective, but it implicitly demonstrated that the personal is political. We can build on what it accomplished without sacrificing theoretical insights or cultural critique. The canon of Hollywood, largely established by the original French auteurists, has yet to be explored, expanded, and challenged. We have plenty of biographies on major directors, but surprisingly few good books of criticism on their films. The vast area of post-1980s cinema and made-for-TV movies is largely uncharted territory. We need discussions of such things by people who work outside the studio marketing departments. The result might be to restore to film criticism the sense of iconoclasm and aesthetic sensitivity it had in the days of the politique des auteurs.

      The Reign of Adaptation

      My title alludes to a relatively little-known essay by André Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” written in 1948 but not translated into English until 1998, when it appeared in Bert Cardullo’s useful anthology Bazin at Work. I especially recommend this essay to readers who think of Bazin almost exclusively as an eloquent proponent of a certain kind of humanist realism in the cinema. Without denying the importance of Bazin’s writings on the phenomenology of the photographic image and the realistic uses of the camera, we need to remember that an entire volume of the French edition of his posthumously collected criticism, published in four volumes under the title What Is Cinema?, was devoted to the relationship between film and other media. The essay on adaptation is one of his most intriguing statements on behalf of what he called “impure cinema,” and it enables us to see him in a new light, as a writer who has something to contribute to what academics today call cultural studies.

      I shall return to Bazin, but first I want to comment on some of the reasons why his essay may have been neglected and why the very subject of adaptation has until fairly recently constituted one of the most jejune areas of scholarly writing about the cinema. One of the major reasons, as Robert B. Ray has pointed out, is institutional: a great many film programs in the academy are attached to literature departments, where the theme of adaptation is often used as a way of teaching celebrated literature by another means (Ray, “The Field of ‘Literature and Film,’” 44–47). Thus we immediately think of Mrs Dalloway (1998) or even of the more freely derivative Orlando (1993) as adaptations, but not of The Set Up (1949, based on a narrative poem), Batman (1989, based on a comic book), His Girl Friday (1940, based