canon fodder

Well, I can't drop names like some of my colleagues, at least not names of directors. So if my comments are wanting for examples, let me know where to look. At any rate, i really enjoyed the debate between Kael and Sarris, with Wollen's attempt at semiotic neutrality on the issue and Foucault's (yeah, I guess we can use the possessive anyway) brain droppings consistently off-message. Authority and authenticity are clearly some slippery areas for cinema, but at some level they are tired, overworked questions. Consider:

Irving: I went around to the art galleries, not with my book, but with a catalog which included a great many paintings that had been sold over the past few years. In this catalog was this Modigliani, which is a Modigliani by Elmyr.

Elmyr: He worked very little, he died very early, so if I add to- a few paintings, a few drawings, it's not going to destroy his ouvre.

Irving: I would say, "this is a fake." and the art gallery owner would say, "oh yes you can see it's a fake"...

But of course you cannot SEE the authority of the work, just as you cannot SEE the unity of the work as such -- on the contrary, the very notion of AN artwork is caught up in the network of forces which produce it, in the strongest sense. In the case of the cinema, we have pointed out that the film as an object is produced by more hands and more visions than those of the director (or producer). We implicitly invoke the markets, the industry, the technicalities and zeitgeist every time we speak of "a movie". What is apparent, and what others in this week have touched on, is that we are dealing with a great many layers of abstraction when we engage films using auteur theory. Kael is quite right to point out that Sarris puts false faith in "rules" by which the auteur's hand can be discerned. This is the same pretension passed off as expertise by the collectors and dealers fooled by Elmyr. Unfortunately, Kael also tangels her argument with her own invective: She dismisses Sarris's methods along with his view of the potential of auteurism, forgetting that her own art of criticism rests on those same methods: interpretation, extrapolation, abstraction out of what can be seen on the screen into concepts and ouvres and even single works of cinema.

The contribution of a sense of authorship, though, is to engender discursive possibility. In other words, once you can recognize the style/brand at work, the instance of that style/brand/auteur's work becomes part of the film-world. There is no chance at a canon, no possibility for criticism as we understand it, from Kael to Foucault to Sarris to Wollen, without the networked film-world in which they each exist alongside the movies and directors and tendencies and abberations they critique.