Definition and Meaning

In sitting down to write up this blog after thinking for quite a long while about what to say, I’m staggered by my own inability to define auteur theory definitively after the readings. Of course, as others and the critics themselves point out, that’s the whole point, or the whole problem. When I was doing my presentation last week, I conceived of auteur theory in the very way Wollen describes as a mistake, i.e. the idea that the director is the most powerful voice amongst all the various “authors” (in the non-Foucaultian sense) that shape the film via its “noise” (Wollen 575). Now, I guess the closest I can glean to a synthesis regarding the definition of what auteur theory is or does is Wollen’s idea of an underlying (unconscious?) structure beneath each film that reveals itself by studying a director’s body of works. However, I’m still confused as to how this structure, which seems to play itself out in large part as the meaningful tension between opposites, is so very different from the expression of a certain meaning in a film. I think the waters get especially murky when Wollen describes directors as using written material as catalysts for their own conscious or unconscious ends (576). While it’s eye-opening for me to think of a film as lacking internal unity (Wollen 579) (perhaps the only internal unity of F is for Fake is rampant deceit and rug-pulling), or to represent one hashing of a director’s inevitable re-hashings over the course of her career, I can’t get away from two ideas: i) my (completely ignorant) feeling that directors must have some type of coherent vision in mind when directing a film (they can’t just unconsciously express everything happening in the historical air, can they?), and ii) the meaning of one film by a director or all films by that director playing itself out on a structural level, not vice versa. Perhaps I’m just on the “wild goose chase” Wollen mentions (579), too much of a fan of meaning to let it evaporate into the air.

Also, I continue to be interested in the circumstances surrounding the film’s reception, especially the negotiation of the film’s meaning between the director and the spectator. The readings for this week left me wondering if auteur theory would consider the spectator more of an author in the film than a consumer of the film, which was how the culture industry critics interpreted the viewing situation. Auteur theorists seem to call for greater participation on the spectator’s part (Wollen: “auteur theory…insists that the spectator has to work at reading the text” – 579), but Kael objects that “the works auteur critics call masterpieces are ones that seem to reveal the contempt of the director for the audience” (269) and that auteur critics intellectualize the mass-produced and mindless drivel churned out by the culture industry (277), which she sees as fundamentally “anti-art” (280). If Welles is considered an auteur and F is for Fake can be considered one part of his auteur body of work, then it seems the director requires much more than passive absorption by the audience if any meaning is to be made.