On the Ontology of Filmmaking:
Production authorship, hierarchy and practices
Galder Sacanell Bañuelos
11683880
MA Media Studies: Film Studies
MA Thesis Universiteit van Amsterdam
28/06/2018
Supervised by
Maryn Wilkinson
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Abstract While the dominant approach to film production studies has centered around the notion of the 'mode of production', as born from the study of the Hollywood system, this essay critically engages the conceptualization born from this approach. In contrast to this paradigm's naturalized embracement of hierarchy and single authorships, the author conceives the field as regarding the ontology of filmmaking and, thus, proposes one of film production's most disregarded elements as, possibly, its most essential: its production practices.
Key Words film production film studies authorship hierarchy production practices mode of production film ontology
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION. The naturalization of hierarchy ...... 5 1. THE PRODUCTION CODE ...... 11 1.1 Authorship in Film Production ...... 11 1.2 The Mode of Production ...... 13 Figure 1. Staiger's mode of production ...... 13 Figure 2. Proposed mode of production ...... 14 1.3 Hierarchy in Authorship and Structure ...... 16 Figure 3. Cameraman system ...... 16 Figure 4. Director system ...... 17 Figure 5. Director-unit system ...... 18 Figure 6. Central producer system ...... 19 Figure 7. Producer-unit system ...... 20 Figure 8. Package-unit system ...... 20 Image 1. The Motion Picture Production Code ...... 22 1.4 Detailed and Social Divisions of Labor ...... 25 Figure 9. Detailed and social divisions of labor ...... 28 2. AUTHORITARIANISM ...... 30 2.1 High and Low Authorships ...... 30 Figure 10. High and low authorships ...... 31 2.2 The Critique of Hierarchy ...... 35 2.3 Alternative Authorships ...... 39 Figure 11. Alternative authorships ...... 39 2.4 A Politics of Collectivity ...... 42 3. A CHANGE OF ARCHE ...... 45 3.1 Hierarchy and Ontology ...... 45 Figure 12. Production practices ...... 47 3.2 Production Practices ...... 47 3.3 The Naissance of a Tradition ...... 50 3.4 An Other Ontology of Filmmaking ...... 55 Image 2. Jean Renoir in La règle du jeu ...... 57 CONCLUSION. The nature of filmmaking ...... 61 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 65
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INTRODUCTION. The naturalization of hierarchy.
In my first filmmaking experience with a home video camera, barely into digital, my group of friends and I needed to make a short film for a school project; its title was Star Wars III and 1/2: The Return of Humor. Be it because nobody really wanted to individually take on all the effort, be it because we wanted to do it as a group, or be it because we really did not know what we were doing, the result was a very horizontal, non-hierarchical, creative process; both in its organization of production and in its distribution of authorship. The only thing we worried about was what had to be done and how to do it, not on who was 'writer', 'director' or 'actor'; someone 'volunteered' to write while everyone else thought, the roles were divided among ourselves, the camera was handled by who was not performing, the editing was done by whoever had some knowledge while the others looked. There was no individual 'author' or singular 'boss' other than our deadline. After this first experience, we move into more ambitious projects, searching for better 'quality' and a more 'professional' result. This 'transition' caused a, barely noticed, change in our production relationships: for some reason, the moment we wanted to do something more 'serious', we felt we had to introduce a production hierarchy; a clear distinction in the roles and responsibilities of each person, and a clear artistic 'head' who commandeered the project. This was, for us, "the way things are done"; at least that is what all the production studies we could find had taught us. As years passed and this experience continued to develop itself, both practically and theoretically, I wondered why that more collaborative practices had been left behind. Is it just a natural part of 'professional' film production to tend towards hierarchy? Or is it a naturalized one to be critically assessed and, perhaps, defied as contingent? This gave way to another series of questions: why does film production, in the main film industries, seem to be organized, a priori and without question, in a hierarchical manner? How did this develop historically? What are the consequences of this uncritical hierarchical disposition of production, particularly in regards to its limited distribution of authorship? Are there any alternatives? May film production be conceptualized so as to avoid a predetermined identification of hierarchy and filmmaking? How would this be?
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These questions will be the articulators of this thesis, which I consider to be a reflection into the ontological properties of filmmaking; particularly in regards to the presence of 'hierarchy'. In consequence, answering these questions will demand, first, an understanding and comprehension of the current theoretical framework used by film production studies, so as to embrace it and, if needed, question it. The starting point and necessary main reference is Janet Staiger's PhD dissertation The Hollywood Mode of Production: The Construction of Divided Labor in the Film Industry (1984), which became the founding text regarding film production studies for all posterior works: from Staiger's posterior volume, with David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985), Charles Musser's "Pre-classical American cinema: its changing modes of film production" (1996), Petr Szczepanki and Patrick Vonderau's Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures (2013) to Paul C. Sellors' Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths (2008). It is interesting to note that none of these works, spanning from 1984 to 2014, directly questions or concentrates on the continuity of hierarchy within the subjects which are being studied —not only is this hierarchy ignored but it is embraced as an articulator of theories without critically questioning the place of hierarchy within these productions. Therefore, many of these scholars build theoretical frameworks that fall for the assumptions of the subject of study itself. This is what I will attempt to showcase and unveil, by comparatively bringing together their different observations and conceptualizations; the inadequacy of certain conceptions to think production processes and the (unrecognized) contingency of many of the historical manifestations being analyzed. This will allow an alteration of Staiger's conceptualization of film production, by understanding how hierarchical notions of authorship have been reified, thus opening film production studies to critical and alternative approaches to hierarchy. This critical approach to hierarchy will be, in turn, brought by anarchist theory, which (re)claims that production be considered as part of broader social context and who point to the negative consequences, socio-cultural and political, to hierarchical organizations of society and production. These arguments will be brought by contemporary anarchist thinkers such as Murray Bookchin and Jesse Cohn, or B. W. Barchfield's (2003) and Francisco Jose Cuevas Noa's (2014) compilations on classical anarchist thought. A critical approach to hierarchy which will be brought into film
6 production by the 'spokesperson' of the film collective 'CineSinAutor'1, Gerardo Tudurí, who proposes a non-hierarchical organization of filmmaking and distribution of authorship in the manifests Manifiesto del Cine sin Autor 1.0. Realismo social extremo en el siglo XXI, Cine XXI. (2008) and La política de la colectividad. Manifiesto de Cine Sin Autor 2.0 (2013). Such types of alternative approaches to film production are also described by scholars Virginia Villaplana in "Cine colaborativo. Discursos, prácticas y multiplataformas digitales" (2015) and Ana Sedeño "Prácticas de activismo audiovisual con objetivo de integración social" (2015) and "Artivismo, activismo y sinautoría audiovisual" (2017). Though these approaches are valuable to highlight the contingency of those hierarchical modes of production and, more importantly, of the hierarchical conceptions of film production dominant in academia, I argue that they are not enough to alter these hierarchical tendencies. Even if they do propose alternative modes of production for an alternative type of filmmaking, it does not challenge directly the adequacy of how, in general, we are conceiving film production. Therefore, their critique of hierarchy must be taken further and the key to do so resides in their places the emphasis on the creative acts rather than on top-down authorship structures: what Staiger calls, in a very much imprecise and disregarded manner, "production practices". Through Antoni Roig Telo's study of "practice theory" in "Participatory Film Production as Media Practice" (2013) we can find a precise definition of 'production practices' which distinguishes it from Staiger's 'mode of production', a central notion in hierarchical conceptions of film production. Therefore, this definition by Roig Telo offers an alternative axis around which to think film production which escapes — through an expansion— the limits of Staiger's theoretical framework. This alternative center for conceptualization was already defended in sociology by James C. Scott in his Seeing Like a State and by anarchism as Jesse Cohn states in "What is Anarchist Cultural Studies?" (2009) but has also been applied to spectatorship studies by the "New Cinema Histories" approach as described by Robert C. Allen in "Getting to Going to the Show" (2010) and Richard Maltby in "New Cinema Histories" (2011); all these will be delved into. More relevantly even, this approach has already been strongly present within a certain tendency of theatre production studies; particularly explicit in Fabrizio
1 Presently active and based in the cities of Madrid, Spain, and Toulouse, France; with previous projects having taken place in the southern Italian region of Puglia (Sedeño "Prácticas"; Tudurí).
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Cruciani's work Registi pedagoghi e communità teatrali nel Novecento (2006)2. Such approximations offer a model that can serve to apply to film production an alternative conceptualization of itself by concentrating on "production practices" and not on the hierarchies of its 'modes of production'. It presents a new center-origin-essence, a new arche, for film production practices and studies: a new ontology; one which is not unheard of within existing film production studies, though not explicitly recognized as a change in approach, particularly within works that attempt to highlight alternative traditions of filmmaking which have been overlooked by the industry and by academia. This includes the case of Gilles Mouëllic's study of a improvisation-based film production in Improvising Cinema (2013) or of feminist reclaims of women filmmakers and non-patriarchal productions such as found in Indie Reframed: Women's Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (2016) edited by Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber. This correlations connect these approaches as examples of alternative conceptualizations of film production, that search for different models and values, and lead to other histories of cinema and to potentially 'truer' and 'healthier models' of production; both in artistic, social and academic terms. Again, the theoretical framework that function as a point of departure for this thesis is Janet Staiger's work, and subsequent discussions of this work. This conceptualization is strongly based around the notions common to film production studies such as 'mode of production', 'production practices', 'division of labor', 'structure' and 'group style'. Yet, these notions will constantly be put into question and discussed within the text by bringing in other approaches and conceptualizations, such as the introduction of the notion of "authorship" by Paul C. Sellors (if also found Gerardo Tudurí's or Charles Musser's texts) or the expansion of the terms of 'hierarchy' and 'production practices', both used by Staiger but only explored in depth by anarchist theorists and Antoni Roig Telo's work, respectively. In consequence, both the method and aim of this thesis will be a discussion of the theoretical framework afforded to film production studies, through a conceptual critical analysis and a comparative approach of it; as allowed by a recurrent historical review of the production models which have led to those conceptualizations.
2 This approach is also present in his others works Lo spazio del teatro and Promemoria del teatro di strada. Though it can also be found in the works of scholars Arthur Sainer in The Radical Theatre Notebook or Elie Konigson in L'espace théâtral médiéval or of directors Peter Brook in The Empty Space or Marco Martinelli in Aristofane a Scampia.
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In conclusion, the corpus central to my thesis will thus be composed, mainly, of film production theorists and of the historical practitioners that are studied by them, the which guided the development of their theoretical frameworks and conclusions. In turn, this corpus is divided into three subjects of study, each corresponding to one of this thesis' chapters and research questions: The first chapter and first part of the corpus concerns the question of why and how is film production organized hierarchically. It will concentrate on Hollywood film production studies, as this has been the most important film industry in regards to its influence on other models of production and is also the origin of the most common film production study's notions. Such is the case of Staiger's the study of Hollywood film production, which will be in turn challenged through her own historical analyses or through the contrasting studies of other scholars. All this will point towards how hierarchy has often been overlooked by these conceptualizations of filmmaking and, then, legitimized through inadequate or incomplete analyses of these historical manifestations. By placing the insistence on hierarchy and authorship at the center of the discussion, the 'single author' paradigm will be critiqued and the film industry will be exposed as primarily articulated around the desire to hierarchically control production; something which has been overlooked by this conceptualization of film production, dominant both in the industry and in academia. On the other hand, and in consequence, the corpus will lack non-Hollywood-based studies of film production such as Bollywood, Nollywood, Hong Kong and Soviet Russia. This Hollywod-centrism and (North)Western-centrism, leaves open the question of how valid these notions of film production are in other contexts and of what concepts and understandings these other industries would offer to the discussion and conceptualization of film production. The second chapter and second section of the corpus regards the consequences of hierarchical authorships and of alternative conceptions. Firstly, this will involve anarchist theorists as these have traditionally placed hierarchy as a central sociopolitical issue. This allows not only to argue the consequences and contingency of Hollywood's hierarchical continuity, but also places film production within a broader social, anthropological and political context, denying it as an isolated process with no effects on society as a whole. This will be done through three contemporary anarchist theorists, Bookchin, Janet Biehl and Cohn, and through two reviews of historical anarchist, by Barchfield and Cuevas Noa, which include more 'classical' anarchist thought. Furthermore, it will present and analyze alternative organizations of production and
9 authorship that consciously avoid hierarchy, such as the anonymous 'CineSinAutor' collective, as proposed and described by Tudurí, Sedeño and Villaplana. Finally, it will question the sufficiency of these approaches which satisfy themselves with being an alternative niche to Hollywood, instead of attempting to change the conception of film production itself. In contrast, it would have been interesting to compare these arguments further with those of whom have defended hierarchy as socio-politically positive and necessary, such as liberal (e.g. Thomas Hobbes3), communist (e.g. Vladimir Lenin4), or fascist (e.g. Joseph Goebbels5) theorists. In regards to film production, this thesis could be expanded by tracing these same ideas within the different models for film production such as that of capitalist Hollywood (and its sphere of influence), of the soviet nations and communist China, or of fascist Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany, among many other possibilities. The third chapter and final part of the corpus approaches the discussion around hierarchy as an ontological question regarding the essence and origin of film production, therefore asking how film production may be conceptualized in a manner which does not inherently embrace hierarchy. The search for this alternative arche will concentrate the corpus on film scholars who have centered not on the traditional center of film production studies, the 'mode of production', but on the 'production studies'. This will lead the notions until here developed into other areas which have already proposed equivalent transitions in perspective: Scott in sociology, Jane Jacobs in urbanism, Allen and Maltby in film spectatorship and film history, or Cruciani in theatre production studies. A change in conception that is based on a different conception of the essence of filmmaking, one that rejects hierarchy as one of its essential characteristics and which pursues an alternative tradition of filmmaking and film studies. One which already finds its foundations in Mouëllic's study of improvisation methods in film production and in Chris Holmlund, Corinn Columpar and John Alberti's analyses on feminist models for film production. That which is missing is all that towards which this model could be expanded or where this alternative approach has already been taken in the past; in those
3 Writer of Leviathan (1651) and one of the theoretical fathers of the modern nation-State, Hobbes is one of the most clear defenders of hierarchy as a sociopolitical model, so as to avoid the ever-present threat and chaos of civil war (which he experienced, in the English Civil War and was deeply impacted by). 4 First head of the USSR and who, in contrast to other communists such as Rosa Luxemburg, vouched for a hierarchical system topped by the 'Party' (Scott 147-195) and who tackled cinema in his "Directives on the Film Business", dictated in 1922 and published in 1925 after his death. [found in Lenin Collected Works. Volume 42. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971. 388-389] 5 Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany who defended a State-controlled film production in his 1935 speech "Creative Film", made at the Kroll Opera in Berlin, published in 1936 (MacKenzie 493-495).
10 unnoticed and disregarded production traditions, forgotten and buried, while attention was placed elsewhere by film scholars and filmmakers alike, waiting to be (re)found: be it improvisation, feminism, the connection to theatre and other arts, or non-Western or dominant productions. Therefore, my thesis is that film production studies has mainly conceptualized itself around the elements which have imposed and articulated hierarchy in the first place: the 'mode of production'. Thus, this has led to an uncritical acceptance of hierarchy in film production and to ignoring those elements which instead are essential to the origin of film production itself, without which a film cannot be made: the 'production practices', around which all the success and process of a production depends. These production practices form the new arche I would like to propose as the articulators for our thinking and conceptualizing of film production; as a conception closer to the ontological essence of what filmmaking is, allowing for a more precise understanding of the filmmaking processes. One closer to that which in filmmaking is natural and necessary, and further from that which is naturalized and circumstantial.
1. THE CODE OF PRODUCTION.
1.1 Authorship in Film Production
One remembers a remark of Ingmar Bergman’s, likening the making of movies to the construction of a medieval cathedral: a mass of craftsmen each perfect at his work, together mounting an aspiration no man could achieve alone. But he was pretty clearly thinking of himself as the unknown master builder. (Stanley Cavell 8)
Most people would agree with Bergman that film production is a highly collaborative process, like the tedious and complex process of building a cathedral. In the first place, because we are conscious of the amount of people needed to make a film; the eternal credits of a blockbuster are its proof. Secondly, because we recognize that each of the multiple ‘departments’ needed to make a film hold distinct creative roles and responsibilities and can thus receive individual praise or criticism; the different categories of the Academy Awards are its institutional confirmation. And yet, much of our conception of film production, film studies and film practice seems centered around
11 the idea of this "master builder". Just like Cavell points of Bergman, we do not find it strange to bestow upon a single individual the crown of authorship —a well identified and world known master builder to whom all the others’ achievements are indebted, such as the likes of Bergman, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, or many others. Why? If it is so clear, from the start, that filmmaking is a group effort, why would we praise an individual as the single author of a film production, branding all other producers as mere subsidiaries of his (or, sometimes, her) capacity? In Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths, Peter Sellors argues that this ‘divinization’ of one individual is, in fact, an incorrect and unjust notion of film production authorship; and one still deeply enrooted in film studies and criticism (16, 111). Yet his argumentation fails to explain why such an understanding ever came to be or why it has become so accepted. My claim is that this is because, though the notion of single authorship is insufficient and unnatural to film production (being imported, instead, from literature studies [Sellors 11]), it, on the other hand, does correctly reflect the power structures under which film production is realized. In other words: ‘single authorship’ does not help us understand the essence of film production, but it does point towards its historical conditions. For these historical conditions are what legitimize the erroneous notion of ‘single authorship'6. As such, Sellors is both precise and misleading when he states that “[D.W.] Griffith certainly is an author of the films he directed, but not solely” (10). Strictly speaking, Griffith was clearly not the only 'author'7 of the film; Griffith would have never made his film without the collaboration of his cast and coworkers. Yet this statement also completely misses the point: the issue is not in recognizing the presence of multiple ‘authors’; the film industry itself already recognizes them as such in the films’ credits. The issue is that, in fact, Griffith was placed in a position where he held the authority and control over authorship. This is what makes it so hard to name all
6 This notion of the 'single authorship' gained dominance in film studies through the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma and its theory of the auteur, which saw the director as the author of a film, par en par to the author of a work of literature, with its consequence artistic and stylistic recognitions. This theory, which advanced the consideration of cinema as an art, was most famously put forward by François Truffaut's 1954 "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema" (MacKenzie 133-144) and then subscribed, if with reservations, by André Bazin in "La politique des auteurs", published in 'Cahiers du Cinéma no. 70' in 1957. This approach was made popular in the USA by film critic Andrew Sarris with his 1962 "Notes on Author Theory in 1962" (which was then heavily criticized by film critic Pauline Kael in her 1963 "Circles and Squares", published in Film Quarterly, 16:3, 1963, pages 12-26). 7 As defined by Sellors, 'author' refers to the "people responsible for structuring a film so that it has the properties and meanings that it does … The question of authorship targets the people who conceive, develop and realize the coherent narrative, aesthetic and thematic unity of a film." (74-75)
12 those involved 'authors', or to speak of collective authorship in multitudinous Hollywood. Because while Griffith often consulted his staff for ideas (and depended on their work), the project’s conception and design remained within his control, as he worked it out, by himself, over the course of making the film (Staiger Hollywood 159). The case of Griffith is not an isolated one, but an example of a phenomenon that impregnates the whole industry as pointed to (indirectly) by Janet Staiger’s studies of Hollywood’s modes of production. As such, the notion of ‘single authorship’ is not merely a misconception of film criticism, but a misconception articulated by the industry itself through placing authorship in the control of a few authoritative hands. “Authorship is a fact of production” (Sellors 104), and if production is hierarchical, so will its authorship. Thus Sellors’ denunciation, that other production members are discounted as “only serving the needs of the director” (16), becomes, instead, a precise description of the industry's management and distribution of authorship. Therefore, if Sellors describes how, for the Cahiers du Cinèma, the Hollywood director could become an auteur despite the industry (19), I will attempt to demonstrate in this chapter that, instead, the Hollywood director would do so precisely thanks to it.
1.2 The Mode of Production8
In her PhD dissertation The Hollywood Mode of Production: The Construction of Divided Labor in the Film Industry, Janet Staiger delineates and describes five different modes of production which succeeded themselves within the Hollywood film industry. They are, in chronological order: the
‘cameraman system’ (dominant until 1906), Figure 1. Staiger's 'mode of production' the ‘director system’ (appearing in 1907 and dominant until 1909), the ‘director-unit group style system’ (same from 1909 to 1914), the ‘central producer system’ (dominant from 1914 to the mode of early 1930's), the ‘producer-unit system’ style production (dominant until the 1940's), and the current ‘package-unit system’ (appeared in 1940's and dominant from the 1950's) (Staiger Hollywood 19-20).
8 All of the diagrams included in this text have been conceived and realized by the author, based upon the author's own understanding of the works being discussed.
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Yet, before we delve into the particularities of these systems, we must examine more closely what is meant by 'mode of production'. For, within this term, I would like to make two subdivisions that are not explicitly recognized by Staiger: the mode of production as an organizational structure and as an organization of authorship. This differentiation points to two distinct types of relationships taking place within the process of film production: a structural one, an organization regarding the 'material' or 'professional' authority during production, and an already mentioned authorial one, regarding the specification of who has creative authority within a production. In other words: the first regards the person with the Figure 2. Proposed 'mode of production' capacity to fire people, decide other people's Staiger's mode of production positions or in general with a say (or group style ownership) over the whole of production (the 'boss') while the second regards the person with the artistic capacity (and style mode of responsibility) over the process in relation to production the product being created (the 'author'). These two 'branches' of the mode of authorship structure production may go together, and many times do, but not necessarily; a change in authorship (from a director to another production director, or a producer) may take place practices without there being a change in structure (the producer still being its head) or one may be the head of authorship and have the last word regarding the film's creative decisions (as a director) but not be the head of structure (who is a producer or an investor) and thus not have the last word regarding their own work position. Or, as Sellors words it (without explicitly recognizing this distinction either):
A director's job is to control a production, while an author's job is to compose and convey meaning. Only if, in the process of controlling a film's production, a director also composes its expressions will that director be an author. (Sellors 113)
This distinction is important because only through it may we concretely analyze the organization of authorship within a mode of production, without confusing it with the persons who are heads of structure within that same production; a distinction that is
14 rarely made or recognized, not allowing for a precise analysis of authorial distribution. This may seem as an obvious distinction within the classical clash between the director's 'creativity' and the producer's 'economics', but it is one not contemplated in the definition of 'mode of production' given by Staiger, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, "a characteristic ensemble of economic aims, a specific division of labor, and particular ways of conceiving and executing the work of filmmaking" (xiv), nor of any other. Authorship, which in this work will have a primordial role, is mostly brought forward in regards to a film's "film style", and in how this, in conjunction with the mode of production, sustains a "group style" (Staiger Hollywood 200)9. But rarely is it considered as inserted within the actual mode of production or its organizational structuring. Instead, the mode of production seems to primarily affect and condition authorship, in its attempt to control and affect the film style while within a certain and desired structure. Therefore, the mode of production establishes who has control over the "expressions of meaning" (Sellors 114) through a distribution of authorship which is controlled and supervised by the production's structure. Thus, my focus will be around the relationships established, within film production, by concrete organizations and distributions, as specified by a particular mode of production, of authorship; "the people who conceive develop and realize the coherent narrative, aesthetic and thematic unity of a film" (Sellors 74-75). An interest articulated and directed by one observation regarding the modes of production studied and articulated by Staiger:
Through time, both the norms and the mode of production will change, as will they technology they employ, but certain fundamental aspects will remain constant (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson xiv),
9 Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, in their work posterior to Staiger's thesis, will call this "group style" a "mode of film practice" (xiv) instead. Which is a term I find awfully confusing as it inserts the word 'practice' without a clear reason, in a field which already speaks of "production practices" and "filmic practices" which are completely separated from this "mode of film practice"; a merging of a concrete mode of production with a concrete film style (leading, for example, to the mode of 'classical cinema'). I, personally, would vouch for the term "mode of cinema" as it suggests its transcendence to the "mode of production" while still suggesting that inclusion of "style" which Staiger's term suggests and Bordwell's 'practice' attempts to maintain; though as it is not that relevant for my discourse, I will keep to Staiger's term for the sake of clarity and simplicity.
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Therefore, if certain "fundamental aspects" remain constant, there is one particular unchanging quality of these modes of production on which I would like to focus, one which defines film production's organization of authorship: hierarchy.
1.3 Hierarchy in Authorship and Structure
This continuous quality means that the historical changes in Hollywood film production which Staiger analyzes, in truth, only affected the middle- and upper-levels of the workforce (Staiger Hollywood 323), while all the rest were left following the same “standard structures and work practices” (Staiger Hollywood 278). In other words, that alterations to the distribution of authorship brought around by 'new' modes of production only resulted in a tighter and firmer control over it by a reduced (if changing) number of people. Returning to our opening argument, it could be said that the modes of production, to allow the birth of those individual and imposed 'single authorships', were conceived and applied as modes of control over authorship; particularly over the authorship exercised by the lower levels of production. There is one single historical exception to this, and it is in that which Staiger names the first mode of production: the cameraman system, where one or several cameramen had control over an entire work process, from its conception and execution, even if working for a production Figure 3. Cameraman system company10 (Staiger Hollywood 92).
In this system, even if these - cameraman - - production company - cameramen very clearly worked for authorship structure someone (e.g. the Lumière conception & execution boundaries Brothers, Gaumont Film Company, Pathè or Thomas Edison), production itself was left in their hands, from conception to execution; deadlines (and budget possibilities) where the only impositions. Following Charles Musser's "Pre-classical American cinema" study of early film production in USA, it is this the only system in which we can find industry-wide examples and analyses of that "authorial collective" Sellors reclaims (74); a "collaborative system", where all authorial authority remains with the makers, in contrast to the hierarchical
10 Some examples of these workers are: the cameramen of the (Thomas) Edison Manufacturing Company William Kennedy Dickson (who also invented the Kinetograph and Biograph cameras) and Edwin S. Porter (who is credited as the director, producer, writer, cinematographer, and editor of The Great Train Robbery [1903], widely considered as the first Western) (Musser). Or Segundo de Chomón, cameraman of the Pathé Frères production company, who is credited with realizing the first camera dolly, the first step-crank process and pioneering hand-coloring (Patrimoni Cultural; Minguet Battlori).
16 ones that would follow. It is for this reason that I would argue that the cameraman system may only be categorized as a mode of production in negative terms, as previous phase to them, making, instead, the director's system as the first true mode of production. Musser himself supports this claim when he states that the cameraman system's of "collaborative, comparatively nonhierarchic system of organization was not a simpler version of later film production but fundamentally different" (104); something indirectly endorsed by Staiger herself when she distinguishes the cameraman mode of production (the one she dedicates less space to) from all posterior ones as the only one to conserve a "unified craft" (Hollywood 92, 19-20); that is: only with the introduction of the director system is the craft 'divided' and, thus, authorship organized hierarchically through divisions of labor.
Figure 4. Director system
conception
- director- external script-outline authorship structure
execution - specialized workers -
Staiger and Musser find discrepancies in regards to this introduction of the 'director system', and I will argue that their clash is due to, precisely, the aforementioned lack of distinction between authorship and structure within the modes of production: while Staiger defends the transition to the director system (Hollywood 100), Musser claims there is no producer system but a direct 'jump' into that of the central producer (90-91). It would seem this difference is not due to contradictory facts, but instead due to Staiger thinking the mode of productions in terms of structure, while Musser does so in terms of authorship. Therefore what for Staiger is a transition in the mode of production, for Musser it is just a change in the size of the team (92). It is correct, and Staiger supports this, that it is only with the introduction of the central producer system that authorship changes hands from the cameraman/directors' to the producers' (Hollywood 174-175). Yet there was a change in structure already with the director
17 system, for other groups of workers were placed, in a subservient manner, under the artistic (authorial) supervision and discretion of the now (before cameramen) 'directors', who "topped a pyramid of workers" (Staiger Hollywood 99); even if the directors kept, among and for themselves, 'collaborative' authorship, until the arrival of the producer systems. It would seem that it is already with the director system that the modes of production, as modes of control over authorship, were introduced; for the directors (who previously had merely been cameraman) became heads of a hierarchical structure which served to impose and allow their authorial visions. Actually, Musser already indirectly recognizes the existence of the director systems when he recognizes their utility when applied to for example, Griffith and his tendency to "auterist" works (96-97); where the impact, in regards to authorship, of his control over structure is more blatant. Or when he states that there are two extremes within the central producer system: the first, the complete dominance of the producer over the director —a producer who holds both authorship and structure, corresponding to the authorship-structure relationship Staiger names 'central producer system'— and, the second, the state of "virtual autonomy of the director", assuming he stayed within certain guidelines (Musser 95), of what Staiger names 'director-unit system' —a director holding authorship but not the structure. Therefore, it is with the institution of the director system in 1907 —propelled by the desire to produce "predictably, rapidly, and inexpensively" (Staiger Hollywood 93) to answer to the demand of the "nickelodeon boom" (Musser 92)— that the previous 'collaborative authorship' is terminated in favor of a hierarchical relationship with the introduction of the modes of production. It is already from the director system onwards that all the characteristics for single and centralized control over authorship are in place —without having to wait for the central producer—: a hierarchy of Director-unit system Figure 5. authorship and a division of labor. It is upon these foundations that all conception posterior modes of production will be constructed (Staiger Hollywood - director- - firm/company - 100), continuing their roles as authorship scenario structure modes of control over authorship, boundaries and upon which the claims and execution recognitions over single authorship - specialized units - in film production, such as Griffith's, were justified and enforced.
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This system of production was expanded upon by the director-unit system, which, by increasing "the number of directors hired as production agents for the firm" (Staiger Hollywood 107) separated once again authorship and structure —as in the cameraman system and in contrast to its unification in the director system— leaving the directors to produce, rewrite, direct, and edit (Staiger Hollywood 110), yet placing it all, once again, within an external "structural hierarchy" (Staiger Hollywood 113) headed by the producers11.
The irretraceable difference in regards to the previous camera system introduced by this director systems is that hierarchy, with its division of labor, was irremediably established within production; structure may have returned to the producers as in the cameraman model but the "workers in each unit only participated in the work for the product of their unit … rather than in the production of all the product (Staiger Hollywood 111). The director may still have been the authorial head of his or her own team but this one followed a hierarchical structure, not a collaborative one; particularly as the firm entered (again) the production process by coordinating and assigning the different directors to distinct projects (Staiger Hollywood 112), as, for example, the Lumière brothers or Gaumont had done during early film production (Musser 85-90).
Figure 6. Central producer system
execution authority conception
- director- - producer -
continuity script structure practices authorship
execution 2nd conception - specialized technicians - - departments / experts -
With the introduction of the central producer system, the change in denomination (from 'director'-based systems to 'producer'-based systems) answers, precisely, to a change in authorship control as the 'studio system' par excellence is introduced; it is here that producers such as Thomas Ince, Cecil B. DeMille, or David O.
11 It is this 'director-unit' system which led to a fiery discussion between Staiger and Matthew Bernstein in Cinema Journal, in regards to whether independent productions would fall in this category or would require of a different one to those proposed by Staiger (Bernstein; Staiger, "Janet Staiger Responds").
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Selznick come to the foreground as 'single authors' of films. Now instead of the director hiring his own staff, choosing the scenario, etc., this was planned by the producer and established through a 'continuity script' that controlled the design of the product (Staiger Hollywood 145-146). Therefore, the producer's approval superseded the director's choices (Staiger Hollywood 148) and the latter become just one more specialized department which the former assembled (Staiger Hollywood 148-149); even if the director always topped the hierarchy of workers (Staiger Hollywood 149), the resulting product was not in his or her hands anymore. The producer-unit system expanded this, similarly to how the director-unit expanded the director system, by multiplying the number of producers leading productions while establishing an external studio head in charge of coordinating their creative efforts (Staiger Hollywood 270).
Producer-unit system Figure 7.
execution authority conception
- director, - associate DoP, editor- producer - - studio head / producer - continuity script practices authorship structure boundaries
execution 2nd conception - specialized technicians - - departments / experts -
Finally, the system 'liberalized' itself with the arrival of the package-unit mode of production where work arrangements and structures were arranged film-by-film (Staiger Hollywood 301). Here, authorship lays precisely in a 'package', for all artistic department heads are Figure 8. equal in that they were Package-unit system put together by a conception - execution producer-agent to - director, producer, stars, writer, DoP, editor - create, together, a authorship - capital (studio, bank,...) - product; without a clear film-by-film structure - agent/producer - hierarchy between them boundaries (Staiger Hollywood
301, 324). This might execution - specialized technicians and departments - justly remind one of the
20 collaborative practices Sellors claimed, but one must not forget that this only regarded the upper- and middle-levels of work; the same hierarchical relationships and pyramidal concentration of authorship still existed (Staiger Hollywood 323, 325), only the number of hands involved had changed. If we take these different systems of production and extend them before us not as historical sequences in a line of progress but as different expressions of one and the same phenomenon, we will have an ample tool with which to think much of the history, and present, of film production. For example, we will find that the director system — which had a great presence in the European 1930s avant-garde movement until it was substituted by producer-based models— serves to explain and describe the type of production model which the auteur theory vouches for and upon which much of the European New Waves and art cinema's based themselves (Thompson). But, most of all, it will allow us to identify and spotlight those shared principles which underlay most of film production in an unrecognized and uncritical manner: the legitimization of the notion of single authorship through an imposed pyramidal hierarchy which oversees and controls all creative processes, raising the artistic criteria of one member over the rest. The motivations for this may be economic or artistic, but the fact remains: the same shared means for those varied scopes continue, unchanged and unchallenged. Though the presence of hierarchy in film production may be clear, the suggestion that this makes the modes of production function primarily as modes of control over authorship may seem absurd and illegitimate. On the other hand, this idea that control over authorship was of outmost importance for film production is not my own, but instead was made public, explicit, and prescriptive by Hollywood's head producers in the Code to Govern the Making of and Talking Pictures or Motion Picture Production Code, enforced by the 'Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America' (or 'MPPDA') from 1934 to 196712 (MacKenzie 405):
The motion pictures, which are the most popular of modern arts for the masses, have their moral quality from the intention of the minds which produce them and from their effects on the moral lives and reactions of their audiences. This gives them a most important morality.
12 A period which coincides with classical Hollywood but also with the central producer, producer-unit, and package-unit systems, as developed by Staiger. It could be considered to be the final and institutional expression of a mentality and process which already began with the introduction of the first mode of production in 1907: the director system.
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1. They reproduce the morality of the men who use the pictures as a medium for the expression of their ideas and ideals. 2. They affect the moral standards of those who, through the screen, take in these ideas and ideals. (MPPDA 411, own italics)
The importance of who holds authorship control Image 1. over the production of the film is primal in this fragment of the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the 'Hays Code' (Production Code for short). As can be guessed, the 'collective authorship' defended by Sellors as the essence of filmmaking, or which took place in Musser's cameraman system, is not the best way of making sure that "the intention of the minds" producing the films have the correct "moral quality"; because who is making the film would not be that definable. Instead, it would be imperative to centralize authorship in concrete, well-known hands which could overpower all the (uncontrollable) authorial [Wikipedia. 1934 Motion Picture actions of those below. Under these principles, hierarchy is Production Code cover. 2017. June 2018.
22 concentrating authorship in one single person's hands. Thus, the infamous "self- censorship" (MacKenzie 405) the Production Code imposed was, in reality, just so for the highest levels of production; those who had decision-making (and thus creative) power. The rest suffered the censorship imposed by the criteria of 'propriety' of those higher levels which 'self-censored' themselves. As a closed knit group of similarly minded and shared interests, it could be argued that Hollywood's uniformity around the "classical" style was not a "simultaneous movement" to that of the mode of production's development (Staiger Hollywood 153), but instead its direct consequence. It was not particular modes of production that lead to standardized aesthetic styles, but the concentration of authorship in an authoritative, small and confabulated group of minds, hearts, and hands, around the values of moral integrity, economic success, and political independence. It is precisely in the intertwining of these three values that the importance of authorship control in film production can be understood, and the common notion challenged. For it is for the imposition of a concrete conceptualization of these three values that hierarchy is justified and authorship control articulated. In the first place, 'political independence' is not to be understood as a 'freedom of speech' (as the Production Code's prescriptions make evident) but as a 'freedom' from any kind of government intervention, Hollywood's greatest fear (MacKenzie 403). This points to two implicit principles: not all was about economics (or the route to economic goals was not always by economic means), and what Hollywood's heads desired for themselves was not necessarily applied to those below them. For if they desired the freedom of applying their own economic and moral values for product and production, they then needed to impose their particular views to the rest of the production pyramid. In second place, these values of theirs, materialized themselves around the attention to the product's 'moral integrity'; not only in an "altruistic" interest for the morality of their citizens regarding certain conservative moral values of religion, race, crime, sex, etc. (MPPDA 406-409), but also in a very self-conscious interest in personal economic profit. Thus, the correct 'moral standard' of the film was not only an ideological motivation, but also an economic one: to attract the maximum possible audience into the cinema, and to avoid government intervention. It was the ideal of what a 'good' film looked and sounded like that checked the modes of production, because the notion was that if the product 'improved' (according to those arbitrary first values of quality), then profits also would (Staiger Hollywood 220). Therefore, authorship was
23 concentrated in the least possible number of hands, who trustworthily would impose the values of a 'good' film on the multiplicity of the personnel needed to make the film, who, otherwise, would be difficult to proof their adhesion to those original values (though this is precisely what the House Un-American Activities Committee would attempt to do). Thirdly, and in consequence, though the objective was always one of economic success, this goal was not achieved through economic means of efficiency and austerity, but instead through lavishly investing the minimum necessary to reach that which was considered a 'good' product (both in its moral and purely stylistic senses). This is that which justified extravagant (yet common) practices such as the consideration, during silent film shoots, that a full orchestra was a necessary element to establish the appropriate mood on set (Staiger Hollywood 195), as the building of sets which were more expensive than building the actual houses they were imitating (Staiger Hollywood 180), or as the extremely expensive reshoots of material that was not convincing, adequate or according to the established standards (Staiger Hollywood 199). Standards which were always established according to the authorships' personal criteria of what a 'quality' film should be, within the technological possibilities of the time. The introduction of new technologies —such as color or sound— would not cause, in themselves, a change in the modes of production, as Staiger claims (Hollywood 229), but merely a stylistic one. Instead, changes in production due to the introduction of new innovations (Staiger Hollywood 216) was not motivated by the technologies themselves but by the new standards of quality these inaugurated —which had always been the aim of US cinema technological research (Staiger Hollywood 216); this would explain why such incorporations were realized without considerations for cost (Staiger Hollywood 220). The stylistic homogeneity of Hollywood laid not in the particular configuration of production practices, but in the restrictive and authoritative distributions of authorship among homogenous individuals. Even when an atypical product, which by Hollywood's standards and ideals should have not been economically profitable, made its way and suddenly was an economic success, Hollywood would rush to imitate that model, applied again through a strict authorial control; only this time oriented towards a new ideal of the 'good' film. "Ideological/signifying practices" (Staiger Hollywood 5) and values did not govern Hollywood, economical ones did; but certainly the former were considered the means with which to predict and achieve the latter. If only for
24 advertising: this key phase was based solely on having a product of a certain quality to market (Staiger Hollywood 216), and having spent millions of dollars was also a valued way to sell product quality (Staiger Hollywood 24); in fact, Hollywood would discover that the more they spent on having a 'good' film, the more they earned (Staiger Hollywood 307). Concern concentrated around achieving that ambiguous 'quality' mark which made cash flow in; while constantly attempting to formalize prescriptive descriptions (Staiger Hollywood 8-9) as, for example, the Production Code. For the same reasons, the variations in between Hollywood and other film industries which imitated its model (Staiger Hollywood 319), would be based on different conceptions of what made a 'good' product; a posteriori conditioning production practices in a non- historically determined manner, even if historically given (as can be appreciated in Staiger's studies of production in the USSR, Japan, and India [Hollywood 338-340]); an unilateral conception always imposed through a strict control of hierarchy, of production in the name of the product. In other words, the "complex and economic ideological/signifying developments" cannot be really separated from the "shifting and coalescing standards of quality filmmaking" as Staiger does (Hollywood 126), but instead both are mutually connected criteria which guide the structuring of film production. Concretely, they justify its hierarchy and monopolization of authorship, in the name of reaching this zealously kept and unilaterally conceived ideal of the 'good' product, to which all other production members merely bow their heads. Hollywood was subscribing Frederick Windslow Taylor's words that, quality did not lay at the workers' level or actions, but at the capacity of the managerial level to plan and control all decisions and steps in the work process (Staiger Hollywood 143-144). This ideal of authorship control required finding a practical materialization within film production. This leads us to the second condition that allows the control of authorship: division of labor. Of this, the most expressive consequence was the introduction of the 'continuity script': "a very detailed shooting script … to plan and budget the entire film shot-by-shot before any major set construction, crew selection, or shooting started" (Staiger Hollywood 126). Conception and execution were to be distinctly separated responsibilities in production.
1.4 Detailed and Social Divisions of Labor
In a similar manner to how I have already argued that the Hollywood system did not mind spending great amounts of money as long as it was for a worthy, quality, result, I
25 would like to propose that division of labor was followed precisely for the control it allowed over the resulting product; more than for the economic control, or efficiency, it allowed, as Staiger argues (Hollywood 16). This was the foremost attractiveness of the aforementioned continuity script; not only in the USA but also in the USSR —called the "iron scenario" (Thompson 397)— or in Germany, in the form of 'classified' scripts (Thompson 392). The continuity script was a strict blueprint of the film, a mechanism to pre-check quality (Staiger Hollywood 23), which was also in itself deeply submitted to radical divisions of labor; "seldom did one person do all the work all the way through" (Staiger Hollywood 183). This, for one, allowed the omniscient presence of an external, single individual who was the only one to hold a whole picture of the process and on whom, therefore, all other activities depended. His or her will was transmitted down all the production line through the carefully designed and detailed continuity script. This common reference, constructed by the holder of authorship, compensated for the dilution of the worker's authorial capacity and for their lack of trans-departmental communication and coordination; the "continuity clerk" is who made sure the these fixed guidelines where being followed and easily supervised by the authorial head (Staiger Hollywood 197). If Sellors has reclaimed that the multiplicity of workers involved in filmmaking implied a collective effort, this multiplicity was instead, historically, articulated through principles of isolation, so as to control the creative input:
A hierarchical and structural arrangement of control over subordinate and separate work functions and hence, product input, is also a characteristic of the labor force. A system of management controls the execution of the work. The mode assigns work functions to each key management position, making the worker in that position responsible for supervising part of the total labor process. (Staiger Hollywood 10)
Yet, this type and function of division of labor is what Staiger calls 'detailed' division of labor: each worker realizes a repetition of an isolated part within the whole process; conception and execution of the work are divided and, thus, the more complicated and more segmented the task, the more specialized and separated from the whole process the worker is (Staiger Hollywood 16), with continuity scripts and clerks compensating for that gap. Therefore, a given worker, while a contributor to the final product, will have a lot less to say how a film will look and sound than the scriptwriter or cameraman, who
26 in turn will have different things to say than the producer (Staiger Hollywood 10). This is the establishment of the authorship pyramid. This type of division of labor contrasts with the "social" division of labor which Staiger (Hollywood 15) and Musser (91-92) assign to the cameraman system, keeping it, uniquely, a "unified craft": a division of labor where "even if the worker at times performs only parts of the whole task, knowledge of and skill in the entire craft" is still in the worker's hands (Staiger Hollywood 15). Or in other terms: when conception of the final product is not separated from its execution. That is: even if one is only executing a single part of the process, that one is still an accomplice of the project's conception as a whole. Authorship remains decentralized, or as extended as the production's extension. Musser exemplifies how this social division of labor would take place in an editing room:
The organization of work seems very close to a ceramics studio where the apprentice mixes glazes and wedges clay while the master makes the pots. Here, too, the apprentice, typically, will be assigned the easier pot-throwing tasks and will gradually develop the skills necessary to becoming a master potter. Both are fundamentally different from the factorylike process of manufacture that involves detailed division of labor, the production and assembly of interchangeable parts, the separation of planning from execution. (Musser 102- 103)
Therefore, social division of labor would regiment the interactions within a single department (such as an editing room) where direct relationships and interactions (and a certain autonomy) still took place, while the "factorylike" relationships would remain in regards to the interactions with other departments and the rest of the production process, due to impositions and controlled isolations of a detailed division of labor coordinated by the presence of a strict continuity script.
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Detailed division of labor Social division of labor Figure 9.
conception conception & conception & execution execution
- specialist - specialist authorship unit - unit - authorship - 'author(s)' - - 'author(s)' - continuity continuity script script
conception & - specialist - specialized departments - execution unit - execution
product product
But Staiger seems to conceive both types of division of labor as mutually exclusive: she states that, with the apparition of detailed division of labor and the introduction of the director system, social division of labor vanished from filmmaking (Hollywood 19-20). Instead it would seem they irremediably coexist; an impression which is coherent with a close study of Staiger's understanding of these work relationships:
In this system of production [the director system], one individual staged the action and another person photographed it. That is, the director managed a set of workers including the craftsman cameraman. (Staiger Hollywood 94-95)
It seems to me that here (as an example of a move present along her entire thesis), two different types of labor relationships are being, unnoticed, equated into one. The first description which states that "one individual staged the action and another person photographed it", reminds me of a social division of labor, not necessarily a detailed one. While what makes this whole system of production a detailed division of labor is the second one: "the director managed a set of workers including the craftsman cameraman". It is not a necessary consequence, as her "that is" seems to suggest, but instead two different properties and work relationships. On the social division of a distribution of work roles, a subsequent detailed division is added: the hierarchical power and authorship of the director over the rest of the workers. Thus, though the first is submitted to the second, both, to a certain extent, coexist together. (It is in this sense that this observation by Ben Brewster becomes relevant: in the film most influenced by
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Bertolt Brecht [Kuhle Wampe, 1932], there was a high degree of division of labor, but that did not necessarily preclude a desirable collective activity [in Staiger Hollywood 347]). The consequence of this misunderstanding, though, as Staiger's position clearly reflects, is that the presence and role of social division of labor is overlooked. Film production is a creative industry and, as such, it requires the input of a large amount of workers whose minds and hearts cannot be controlled as precisely as the Production Code, for example, would have desired (Staiger Hollywood 346). What is attempted, instead, is to funnel those inputs under the supervision, vision and desires of one 'single authorship' placed at the top of a hierarchy who gets to decide what is the 'good' product that will lead to economic success. In conclusion: though, contrary to Sellors, there is a production reality which supports (and has legitimized) the understanding of film production as a 'single authorship', through the detailed division of labor, all workers involved still need to be, and are, authors to a certain (carefully controlled) extent, as he claimed, in as much as the social division of labor continues to be irremediably present. It is in this sense that Sellors' critique of the notion of single authorship is correct: we must in fact remember that film is most frequently produced collaboratively (Sellors 7). He correctly points that film production "involves communication and negotiation between members of the production team and will, by virtue of the knowledge each brings to the process, engage a wide range of ideas, perspectives, and filmmaking practices" (Sellors 75). I believe, like Sellors, to this being the true heart of filmmaking, but structurally this has not been the established reality. Precisely looking at the "facts of production" which Sellors highlights as the point of reference for correct authorship analysis (7), through Staiger's studies, my conclusions have precisely lead me to the opposite of what he intended: film production has been structured towards a tight-knit, 'single' authorship of the film product through the modes of production's hierarchy and division of labor, justifying this notion of a 'single', hierarchical, authorship. Though the "collective authorship" Sellors reclaims still remains present in the form of the social divisions of labor, these are more the 'irreducible pillars' which film production cannot do without, more than a fact supported by film production structure in general. Instead, they would be precisely that which film production has attempted to suffocate, allowing the emerging of the 'single author' paradigm which the auteur theory picked upon. This does not mean that this 'single author' production systems are false or
29 not valuable in themselves, it just unveils the ignored "tower of glass" (Nietzsche) upon which they have sustained themselves. It does so to point out that these single 'authors' have not been such in spite of a terrible and anti-creative system, but precisely thanks to the position of power such a structure placed them in; pharaohs over a carefully built pyramid. Having reached this point, another issue looms over this discussion, namely: so what? What if film production is profoundly hierarchical? Is this a problem? If, in effect, these modes of production have allowed to create the all-powerful film industry Hollywood is, with all its efficiency criteria, economical benefits, numerous quality products and qualified single authors, was this not film production's necessary turn away from the ineffective, if original, "collective authorships"? Why should we not just continue to embrace this production method as filmmaking's best available option? This will be the next chapter's topic; not only to point at the undesirable conditions and consequences created by a hierarchical status quo in film production, but also to denounce the contingency of this historically dominant filmmaking model.
2. AUTHORITARIANISM. 2.1 High and Low Authorships
In the previous chapter, I have addressed how the idea of the 'single author' became institutionally established by the organization of film production through the ordinances of the 'mode of production'. The 'author' of a film is the member at the top of a clearly delimitated hierarchy, thanks to the pyramidal centralization of creative decision making enforced by detailed divisions of labor. This detailed division of labor which legitimates a single (or limited) possession of authorship, a creative authoritarianism, is placed in detriment of the inevitable multiplicity of creators involved in a film production: from light technicians, to scriptwriters, to hairdressers and color correctors, to producers and assistant directors. The hierarchy which is imposed through a detailed division of labor is a mechanism of control over the collective origin of filmmaking, which follows a clear division of labor but of different nature: a social division of labor according to different crafts and specializations. Nonetheless, this imposition of a detailed division of labor on the social one does not eliminate the latter, for the (to a certain degree) creative freedom of the lower
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layers of the pyramid is necessary for the manufacturing of the film (even if heavily supervised by the top layers of the hierarchy). In this sense, it could be described as the coexistence within film production of two kinds of authorship; both of which are necessary for the Hollywood system and, yet, of which only one has been played close attention to. The first one is the 'high' authorship of the heads of the mode of production who make the overarching decisions and apply them through the structures of detailed divisions of labor; be they directors, producers or other. The second one is the 'low' authorship of all the film crew and talent who, complementarily, create the material reality, through the day-to-day small scale decisions —belonging to a social division of labor— required to create that which is envisioned and supervised by the 'high authors'. It is this second kind of authorship, and second kind of division of labor, which I wish to highlight in this second chapter as being that which has been made invisible by the hierarchy of detailed division of labor and high authorship. The goal would be to point out, firstly, the consequences of this imposition of hierarchy unto the original situation of artisan-like division of labor both in personal-creative and socio-political senses. Secondly, to highlight the contingency of the dominant conception of film production as a primarily hierarchical enterprise. Figure 10. High authorship (as detailed Low authorship (as social division of labor) division of labor)
conception
- department - department worker - worker - high authorship high authorship - 'author(s)' - - 'author(s)' - continuity continuity script script - department worker - Low authorship Low authorship - specialized departments - execution
product product
The first point I would like to make is that the coexistence, or survival, of this social division of labor and low authorship alongside the detailed division of labor and its high authorship is not a merit of the Hollywood system. This is instead, as Jesse Cohn puts it, the "potential that is intermittently visible within the forms of order that
31 constrain it, and that this order cannot constrain completely" (Cohn 14). It is that which remains of the original filmmaking order (that of the artisan-like cameraman system) which the industry cannot go without if it wants to continue being a group endeavor (with the need for all kinds of specializations and the uniqueness they may bring). This is not to say that the Hollywood system does not hold virtues of production, efficiency and even of creativity. But the point is that its virtues originate not from its hierarchical organization of production, but from its social division of labor. And when not so, those virtues are not specific nor originate from hierarchy. In contrast, it seems that Staiger, in her final attempt to signal the positive elements of the Hollywood system, tries to 'save' its hierarchical nature by praising its nature as a social division of labor; that which, instead, Hollywood's modes of production were precisely born against:
What does seem to me valuable in the Hollywood mode of production is its ability to combine the expertise of multiple crafts. Groups of specialists, although in divided labor, make films which just seem difficult to conceive having been created by workers in other work arrangements. … it does seem to me that much is commendable in joint-work projects in which the skills of individuals are combined to make something perhaps otherwise not possible. Others before me have noticed this about the Hollywood work mode. Many workers felt a great sense of pride in the craftsmanship which went into the film. (Staiger Hollywood 346)
Yet, if in the Hollywood mode of production that which deserves preservation is its social divisions of labor, as Staiger states, then what is being said is that, from Hollywood, all that must be preserved is, precisely, all that which is not specific to its structures, modes, and hierarchies of production. A situation which does not only take place within academia, but also within the industry as in the case of cinematographer Harold Rosson13, also quoted by Staiger, who begins arguing for the hierarchical and aristocratic nature of Hollywood's (detailed) film production…
I am a product of the studio system, star system, and I thought it was a very good way to make pictures. I'm sure it hampered some, but when I think of the
13 Hollywood cinematographer five-time nominee to the Oscar Academy Awards and who, among others, worked in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Duel in the Sun (1946) and Singin' in the Rain (1952). (IMDb. 2018. Amazon Company. June 2018. < https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005849/>)
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great help it gave so many many more than it hampered, I think it helped a great deal more than it hampered.
…to then continue his case by precisely praising qualities belonging to an artisan-like social division of labor or, at the very least, not at all related in an exclusive manner to a detailed division of labor and its hierarchy…
I was so happy with my work, I wanted to see it on the screen. I had the best time in the world, and for that I was paid. … Yes, a group [of people] falling together and thinking together and praying together, and you wanted on result— a good pictures. And you wanted to be mixed up in it. (qtd. in Staiger Hollywood 347)
In both cases, in Staiger's and Rosson's, what truly is being praised is not the hierarchical and single-authorship nature of the Hollywood mode of production but, instead, the collective nature of its production; something not specific to that hierarchical mode of production but, instead, to cinema itself since its very beginnings, even before the surge of modes of production as we know them14. In other words, what is being praised is the "collective intention" (Sellors 121), more associated to low authorship, which leads to a collective result, rather than the benefits of the hierarchical imposition of a high authorship. Precisely, one of the main reasons behind this confusion and incapacity to properly analyze Hollywood film production, so as to understand how and why it works, resides in the aforementioned blindness to the surviving (but distinct) existence of social division of labor within the imposition and hegemony of detailed division of labor. The misguided identification of both impedes the thinking of subsequent or parallel alternatives, as hierarchy ends up being defended through the virtues of that which is precisely non-hierarchical. Furthermore, it provokes the acceptance of both forms of labor in the name of the one being structurally rejected and disregarded by the industry and by academia, by our conception of film production: the low authorship of the social division of labor. A conception which, if not adjusted, will lead to continued uncritical acceptances of hierarchy, through misguided arguments which have little to do with hierarchy or its virtues.
14 In the 'cameraman system' as studied by Charles Musser (91), previous to the 1907 introduction of the modes of production (see chapter 1).
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This is what I consider a conceptual 'mistake' or 'blindspot' which has not only articulated and justified the historical modes of production which I have gone through in the first chapter, but also its latest and current installment (if we keep to Staiger's 1981 study): the package-unit system. As a consequence of the disregard (or even direct invisibility) of low authorship as an essential element of film production, the individual craft workers' obsession is that of fighting for recognition and bargaining power so as to climb in the pyramid of authorial hierarchy, allowing for a greater power in contract agreements and thus greater pay but also creative authority and freedom (Staiger Hollywood 237). This individual urge contrasts with the collective struggle by workers' unions to defend and maintain division of labor (Staiger Hollywood 233-237), which in itself would seem contradictory. My understanding of this incoherence on behalf of the unions (who fight to maintain division of labor) is that, at an individual level, Hollywood workers attempted to rise within the detailed division of labor, while unions attempt (or have attempted) to maintain the relative authorial capacities of their collective social divisions of labor (even if, by now, it only exists at departmental-level and not inter-departmentally as in the cameraman system). Awards and public recognitions served to continue that 'American dream'-like possibility of achieving "recognition in their work categories" (Staiger Hollywood 238) and, thus, high authorship or authorial authority. This allows the system to extract the maximum of the workers' capacity, in their desires to rise, while keeping them within the boundaries of the status quo and the imposed notion, from the high authors, of a 'quality' product. Even when one individual broke the rule, he or she still did so to settle down within its same principles (Staiger Hollywood 238-240): hierarchical authorship was maintained, control over production is the award for extraordinariness, not the questioning of the system. Similarly, 'low' and 'high authorship' stay clearly delimitated and differentiated, both practically and evaluatively, emphasized by the package-unit system's new labor situation; where workers were contracted on a film-by-film basis, later returning to the labor pool (Staiger Hollywood 316). In contrast, the change in (some) salaries from being time-base to being profit-based encouraged more cooperative "pre-shooting planning and less strict division of labor" (Staiger Hollywood 322). Yet, this affected only the middle- and upper-levels of the structure and merely accentuated the individual struggle for 'escalation' within the hierarchy. The fact is that this apparent sudden explosion of 'democracy' in film production was based on the higher levels' bargaining power (Staiger Hollywood 320), and overlooked the fact that for the rest of the
34 production pyramid the hierarchical imposition of authorship continued to work in the same way, as pointed to by Staiger (Hollywood 323). It does not cause the disappearance of the pyramid, but merely a flattening and expansion of its uppermost section (leading to its volcano or plateau-like shape in the diagrams). In practice, this has lead to the transnational phenomenon of a precarious labor- based film production, which John T. Caldwell has called "stress aesthetics". Powered by the need to demonstrate exceptionalism (to rise in the hierarchy and improve one's conditions) situations of deprivation are justified and legitimized; actual salaries being substituted by "symbolic payroll systems" and "production stress" being defended as "a profitable catalyst and resource for innovation" (Caldwell 92). Within the most "collaborative" authorship distribution system since the introduction of the modes of production around 1907 (in USA), the same principles continue to exist, overlooked: the imposition and uncritical predominance of a hierarchical high authorship, while low authorship is relegated more and more into precarious positions of subservience where the only existing dream is that of ascending into higher levels.
2.2 The Critique of Hierarchy
Hierarchy is that underlying condition of possibility of all the relationships in Hollywood film production; this is what is being overlooked. Staiger herself points how many workers found their work conditions "alienating, depressing, stiffling" for they were not taken into account or their creative actions and capacity were completely ignored or overrun (Hollywood 337). As some filmmakers put it themselves: the isolated working progress stops it from being an integrated creation, destroying "individuality of style" and "encouraging indecision and cowardice" (Staiger Hollywood 337). Though there obviously are mechanisms within Hollywood against open abuse of the higher spheres upon the lower ones, Caldwell's study points to how the notion of 'open abuse' is always a relative one. And though these abuses are denounced when made public —for generally they are open secrets—, the overall criticism and reaction (also regarding academia) seems to keep itself to one of the precepts of that old rulebook, the Production Code:
The courts of the land should not be presented as unjust. This does not mean that a single court may not be presented as unjust, much less that a single court
35
official must not be presented in this way. But the court system of the country must not suffer as a result of this presentation. (MPPDA 414)
Thus, though individual situations and behaviors are questioned, rarely is the whole system itself put in doubt. A whole which, in my view, is primarily articulated by a hierarchical organization of production; one realized around the vertices of a (detailed) division of labor which establishes a high authorship that supervises, buries and overrules the necessary (and still present) creativity of low authorship. The consequences of which are more profound than merely product or economic-related, but have direct social and personal consequences. Post-Marxist writer Rudolf Bahro expressed that the difference which signals two groups is that some "realize a productive job by means of a creational activity", while the others "must realize an alienating job to be able to live, which is time lost for their personal development" (qtd. in Barchfield 56). It is here that the sociopolitical and anthropological importance of the distribution of authorship power comes to the forefront: the importance of the right to authorial authority lays not on questions regarding recognition and merit but on personal-emotional-intellectual consequences for those involved, opening the discussion of who has the right for expression and personal development. Therefore, the center of attention suddenly situates itself within the production phases, previous to any considerations of final products or results, as is tendential in —mostly product-based— discussions on film production. In this same moment does the philosophical, sociopolitical, anthropological and pedagogical tradition of anarchism situate itself in regards to hierarchy: the ends that justify such an organization do not legitimize the consequences of its means. According to scholar J. W. Barchfield, anarchist thought delineates six concrete ways in which hierarchy (the "theft" of power, paraphrasing Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) negatively impairs individual and collective well-being: 1) dominates, through threats, the perpetration of violence on its members; 2) limits the liberty of individuals and the development of their human nature; 3) realizes unjust appropriations; 4) distorts characters; 5) impedes solidarity; 6) destroys their predisposition to practice social cooperation (Barchfield 31, 38). All these can be seen in the analysis of hierarchical film production: in the analyses of Caldwell, in the criticisms of Sellors, and in Staiger's work. And at the base of it all is the detailed division of labor: "The first effect of the division of labor is the depravation of the soul" (Proudhon qtd. in Barchfield 44)
36 because the capacity to "initiate, innovate, choose, judge, and decide is reserved to a minority" (translation by author15, Colin Ward qtd. in Barchfield 42). The fourth consequence delineated by Barchfield is of particular interest: the distortion of character. The anarchist tradition recurrently emphasizes that "people do not create situations, they are the situations which create people" (Mikhail Bakunin qtd. in Barchfield 74) or, in words of one its theoretical founders, William Goldwin: "the individual is, at any given historical moment (moral and intellectually) the resolution of the experiences he or she lives, and thus a working day limited to particular and fragmented chores creates empty individuals" (qtd. in Barchfield 43). The consequence of this perspective is, on the one hand, that those in high positions of power will exercise abuses of power, even if unknowingly and unintentionally, for they are formed by their experience of privilege while, on the other hand, those in the lower-end will be relegated to a loss of their "creative power", as Piotr Kropotkin expressed it (qtd. in Barchfield 50). And the lack of creative power impedes the invention of alternatives and the expression-development of the self. As the contemporary psychologist Carmi Schooler concluded, those under relationships of domination present a low level of "1) intellectual flexibility, 2) intellectually demanding use of their leisure time, 3) personal moral responsibility, and 4) self-attribution of the responsibility of their destinies" (qtd. in Barchfield 60-61). Therefore the uncritical continuation of (creative) hierarchy in film production has multiple consequences which affect not only the industry itself and the well-being of its members (inside and outside the job) but also has high-key consequences at a wide sociopolitical level. As the filmmaker and theoretician Gerardo Tudurí summarizes it:
All which we had learned from the capitalist mode of production had submerged us in the misfortune of producing alone, in the political indifference regarding the social character of our works, in the exhausting war of competition for a spot in the limbo of critics and institutions, in an emptiness that transformed us into individual aesthetic tramps loaded with objects, in search of fans, followers, readers, spectators, and buyers. (translation by author, Tudurí Cine XXI 233)16.
15 All quotes extracted from Barchfield's text have been translated from Spanish to English by the author. 16 Due to the difficulty of this particular quote, I will reproduce the original text herein: "Todo lo que habíamos aprendido del modo capitalista de producir nos había sumido en la desgracia de producir solos, en la despreocupación política sobre el carácter social de nuestras obras, en la agotadora guerra de competición por obtener un lugar en el limbo de la crítica y las instituciones, en una vaciedad que nos
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Thus, in an industry where the dominant relationships are ones of hierarchy, this is exactly what is being projected (and conforming) society itself, creating human beings which answer to the role they are being given in (among other things) their jobs. And film production, in its attention to authorship, makes a clear division among those with the capacity/permission to create and express, and those who do not, which causes a degrading of their own image of their "human potentialities, of his or her capacities to take direct control of the means of administering social life" (Bookchin qtd. in Biehl 162). In the detailed division of labor, that which was a mere difference in ability, experience, or knowledge (which would merely serve to orientate the social division of labor) becomes an acceptable rationale for domination (Biehl 76). According to anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin, hierarchy was born as a reaction on behalf of the older members of a community who, seeing the failing of the capacities which had lead them to situations of responsibility and leadership (which do not necessarily imply hierarchy) began to institute hierarchy as a method to keep their power well over the end of their productive capacities (qtd. in Biehl 123). This could be seen as parallel to the moment when the cameramen from the cameraman system began to become producers with other cameramen below them following their indications, while they themselves stopped participating in that original social division of labor to become their 'authorial heads'. At the same time, the (recent) transition into the package-unit system could be seen to reflect the subsequent weakening of those 'gerontocrats' who, rather than losing their power, "look for alliances and promote the creation of centers of power mutually advantageous which protects them from the community" (Bookchin qtd. in Barchfield 28-29); that is, they widen the amount of 'high authors' (in contrast to the single one) in exchange for keeping the strict hierarchy on those who remain below, and their (even if shared) position in it.
convertía en individuales vagabundos estéticos cargados de objetos, en busca de fans, seguidores, lectores, espectadores y compradores."
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2.3 Alternative Authorships Figure 11. Hierarchical low authorship Collaborative authorship Without authorship (as a social division of labor within a (as a social division of labor) (as a no-division of labor) detailed division of labor)
authorship authorship authorship
product product product
It is following this same reasoning that certain groups have attempted to find alternative modes of production that assume a different organization and distribution of authorship in film production. This move, proximate to that original state of collaboration and social division of labor, does not make it a "primitivistic yearning for the past … but a recognition of past possibilities that remain unfulfilled" (Bookchin qtd. in Biehl 152- 153). In my opinion, in the same way that the criticism of hierarchy finds roots in anarchist thinking, these alternatives find connections with Bookchin's proposal of a "libertarian municipalism" (see Biehl 173) or with anarchism's general conviction that self-management is possible and more beneficial (or certainly not less problematic) than the current representative democracies (which could be said to have parallelisms with the representative-like package-unit system). One of these alternatives, on which I would like to concentrate is the proposal of the collective CineSinAutor17. This collective (whose theoretical spokesperson is Gerardo Tudurí) proposes an alternative organization of film production and authorship embedded in a precise historical trend of filmmakers which defy the established notions of production; from Dziga Vertov, Robert J. Flaherty, John Grierson, or Germaine Dulac to Dogma 95, the Third Cinema (particularly Jorge Sanjinés) or the indigenous Latin-American cinema. These alternatives have been called minor but, "together, as minorities, [they] may constitute true majorities at the margins of corporative production" (translation by author18, Tudurí Manifiesto 15-16).
17 Which would translate to English as 'CinemaWithoutAuthor'. 18 All quotes extracted from Tudurís' texts have been translated from Spanish by the author.
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In a (in)direct reference to the denunciations that anarchism makes to hierarchy and its "unjust appropriation", CineSinAutor quotes film critique Serge Daney to explicit their posture towards the monopolization of authorship: what has been called a "politics of the auteur" is in truth a "politics of the ôteurs", of "those who take" (qtd. in Tudurí Manifiesto 10). It is this "theft" (as Proudhon would put it) of authorship within production on behalf of a minority and in detriment of its majority of participants that CineSinAutor's proposal and research attempt to correct —while trying to transmute the "distortion of character" of hierarchical film production into a "forming" of one by the "effective democratization of the cinematographic processes" (Tudurí Cine XXI 261).
Without Author does not mean without authorship. It means without that old Author in who's denomination we have deposited all of cinema's restricted and elitist private property. (Tudurí Cine XXI 260)
This explicit search for different organizations of authorship which avoid the institutionalized notion of the 'single author', is what articulates CineSinAutor's alternatives to the dominant and hierarchical mode of production. Though there also are other approaches to this problematic of authorship different to CineSinAutor's "cinema without author": "open cinema" or "cinema opensource" inspires itself from the culture of the free software where multiple processes of production are open to a multitude of persons (Sedeño "Cuestionando" 6); "collaborative cinema" attempts to challenge the logics of hierarchy through processes of coproduction which attempt to incorporate and share different sensibilities in a single group (Villaplana 93); or "collective cinema" that dilutes the distinction in between producer and consumer through methods such as crowdfunding (Sedeño "Cuestionando" 7). Scholar Virginia Villaplana delineates three different levels of collaborative practices in film production:
1) A creator or group of creators participate in the life of the represented or filmed subjects with a firm long-term compromise, but the aesthetic strategies are not negotiated with them. The creative team divides itself by roles (direction, camera, edition, etc.). 2) A group of creators within which there is no division of roles: everything is decided in between the members of the teams, and the aesthetic strategies may or may not be negotiated with the represented or filmed subjects.
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3) Non authorial model. Cinema without authorship: all the involved subjects, represented and not represented (filmed and not filmed), decide everything with everyone in a process of constant negotiation. (translation by author, Villaplana 93)
These three variants could be described in the following way: 1) a core team which, following social divisions of labor, interacts with an external subject or audience; 2) a core team which, with no division of labor, may or may not have an external subject or audience; 3) a core team which, with no division of labor, has no external subjects or audiences (as all are included within the core team). This definition by Villaplana can be seen to be intertwining two different levels that do not necessarily merge, as she points out (though this may have been the historical case), but of which there would be many possible combinations. On the one hand, there is the level (and choice) regarding division of labor: production can be organized according to a detailed division of labor (the Hollywood model), a social division of labor (to certain extent also present in the Hollywood model), or no division of labor (CineSinAutor). On the other hand, there is a level and decision regarding the relationship, of the core-creative team, with the external subjects of representation or audiences of presentation. As such, what takes place in the Hollywood model is that, firstly, the core-creative team is split in two by the detailed division of labor and the birth of a high and a low authorship: all the production team is part of the core team (the execution team), but only a minority part of this is then part of the creative (the conception) team. The subjects of representation may be external (as when Hollywood makes an orientalistic film about China) or may be internal (as when Hollywood makes a film about itself), while audiences are always external. On the other hand, contrary to Villaplana's division, a core-creative team which decides to keep a social division of labor (a distribution of roles, without a centralization of decision-making) could still include within itself the filmed/represented subjects; when the talent is part of the core team, for example, and not an external addition, or when the core team makes a film about their own lives and, thus, are them themselves the represented subjects. Similar would be the case of collaborative-collective films funded by crowdfunding and crowdsourcing but which maintain a distinction between the core team and the external participants and collaborators (for examples of this last case see: Roig Telo, "Cine en Abierto" and "Participatory filmmaking").
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2.4 A Politics of Collectivity
What makes CineSinAutor particularly interesting is its radical and conscious effort against the naturalization of hierarchy in film production; situating this effort within a historical trend of alternative authorships within cinema (particularly without author): from Alexander Mevedkin's cinema-train, to the by him inspired Medvedkin Groups in France, to the Varan Workshops in France, to the British Free Cinema, to the Latin- American political cinema of Julio García Espinosa, Jorge Sanjinés, or the Ukamau group, to the Scandinavian Cine-Dogma or the progressive cinema of Pedro Costa inspired by Jacques Rivette and Robert Bresson (Sedeño "Cuestionando" 9-11). A way of understanding cinema that allows for an conception of authorship as a collective power; one to "decide on the own production of filmic creation, the own aesthetic and own administration of the work and its benefits" (Tudurí qtd. in Sedeño "Cuestionando" 21). One which, in turn, situates film production in a broader social context and adds to it a social responsibility for it is considered that a film has three durations in time, all equally important to that of the film's duration in minutes: the time previous to and of production (the social time of production), the time of the finished film (the film's duration in minutes), and the time of the film's (and its production's) social impact (Tudurí "Cine Sin Autor" and Manifiesto 10). Therefore, a sociopolitical approach to filmmaking that brings forward a conception of film where the attention is not placed anymore (or not only) on the final product, but also on how that product comes to be. This is what CineSinAutor calls a Politics of Collectivity: "an idea of cinema which is not an idea of cinema but an idea of social encounter" (Tudurí Cine XXI 256), which does not paralyze individual initiatives and, at the same time, includes them within a common discussion (Tudurí Cine XXI 280). Being the transformation of the participants by the production as central as the generation of the film itself (Tudurí Manifiesto 6), the most important element of filmmaking is not in the resulting product. As Tudurí quotes Jean Rouch's narration at the end of the 1961 La pyramide humaine:
What does it matter a believable story or a copied one! What does it matter the camera or the microphone! What does it matter if during these weeks a film has been born or if this film does not exist! What has occurred around the camera is more important. Something has occurred among these cardboard classes … The film finishes here… But the story has not yet ended… (qtd. in Tudurí Cine XXI 284)
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This is perhaps the big lesson offered by CineSinAutor, in consonance with anarchism's demands: the film as a social value; one which comes prior and stands further than the film itself. A conception which demands the end of hierarchical organizations of production for the sake, first, of the production itself and, second, in the name of society as a whole. It is in these proposals that I believe one can find effective models for alternative modes of production which, precisely, allow us to think and believe in the real possibility of alternate models, while also pointing out to the negative effects of the ones we currently follow. Even then, I believe there is something more that needs to be done so that these alternatives may lead us to a reconceptualization and rethinking of film production itself, and not merely to the inauguration of an alternative niche to that of the 'mainstream' film production. Because if one honestly believes that the hierarchical organization of film production is harmful, not only in a creative sense but also in a social and personal one for the people involved, it is not enough to accept their coexistence. But this claim requires further clarification. On the one hand, it seems that single authorship models should be (authoritatively) substituted for collective models of authorship or of no-authorship. Instead, there is the possibility for working models of single authorship that are non- hierarchical; just like collective authorship can also be hierarchical. For example, in a team of people who decide to follow the creative vision of one person, this does not necessarily imply detailed division of labor or the exclusion of everyone (other than the 'single author') from the conception process; it merely implies that for a concrete production, everyone wants to work together (voluntarily) towards the vision embedded in one single person; allowing collective efforts to exist without the need to negate individual uniqueness, but also recognizing its collectively-situated nature. In contrast, a 'collective authorship' can also become authoritarian and hierarchical when there is a division between core-creative team (first-class) crew and external (second-class) crew who follow the directions and ideas of the former without being part of it. Therefore, there needs to be a distinction in between the authorial organization —who is in charge of the creative cohesiveness of the project— and the hierarchical-power structure — who makes or supervises all decisions. Even though these, in the Hollywood and dominant model, have gone together in hand, they do not need to necessarily. Or more importantly, and I will return to this at the end of this chapter, that, perhaps, our current point of focus is not the most appropriate to analyze film production when the object of
43 discussion is the nature, hierarchical or not, of production relationships within filmmaking. On the other hand, and continuing this line of thought, it is not enough to create an alternative niche of production that merely contrasts with the dominant hierarchical model. Instead, a way has to be found to present an alternative way of thinking film production and authorship, at its widest scale, which affects and alters our vision also of the dominant system; the need to find a different conceptualization of film production itself, that denaturalizes hierarchy and authoritarianism in production. If not, the risk is precisely of falling for the niche, or that which Bookchin called "lifestyle anarchism": the self-relegation to the "outside of history, in the realm of the subjective" instead of "within history, in the realm of the objective" (qtd. in Biehl 165). In other words, the risk is to end in the same place as the politique des auteurs which was a confrontation against a model and ended reproducing its production conditions and merely accompanying it as a younger sibling. Therefore, what needs to be tackled and approached is exactly that what is being denounced: the Hollywood model and the established study and thinking of film production itself. The question is how this model and way of conceiving film production can be challenged by the tools and critiques granted by alternatives such as CineSinAutor's. Because, in the end, the hierarchy that 'needs' subverting is the one that dominates from the center, and not the one scurrying in the margins. In conclusion, what can be attempted is to propose a different way in which, from academia and film studies, we can look, think, and conceptualize the essence of film production itself, its ontology. For it is this which, in truth, is being discussed: what is film production, what is its essence, what is its heart; what is that which makes film production film production, and which are its contingent conditions. Is hierarchy essential or a contingent condition? And, if it is a contingent condition as this chapter suggests, what may be its essence? If, the first chapter offered a renewed understanding of the established tradition, history, and issues of the current dominating mode of production (and of its conception by academia and public), this second chapter served to argue the contingency of this model, and to challenge its ontological claims as the only way of filmmaking. Nevertheless, the aim of this essay lies further ahead: in the intersection of these two previous observations I propose we consider how, maybe, we have been conceptualizing film production from the wrong point of view since the beginning,
44 causing us to consider primal that which is accidental. That, perhaps, what we need is a change of arche.
3. A CHANGE OF ARCHE. 3.1 Hierarchy and Ontology
'Hierarchy' itself, as a word, makes a statement about not only organization or authority but mainly about the ontology of something; only with an ontological definition can authority be place somewhere. As such, this role of the word is embedded in its own composition, in its two etymological roots: the first, 'hier', originates from the ancient Greek word 'hieros', which means "sacred", while the second, 'archy', comes from the also Greek 'arkhos' meaning "chief, leader, commander" (Harper). In consequence, the original Greek meaning of the word 'hierarchy' (or, in its original Greek form, 'hierarkhia') meant "rule of a high priest" (Harper). At first sight, this original definition of 'hierarchy' holds two distinct but key concepts: rule and high. The former, points towards that first and more explicit understanding of 'hierarchy': an organization where someone rules. This, in turn, holds the implicit consequence that someone must simultaneously be ruled. This corresponds to our previous discussions of authorships where rule (author) corresponds to high (authorship) and ruled to low (authorship). This authorial-spatial relation is one embedded in the original meaning itself of hierarchy: "rule of a high priest", the "chief, leader, commander" of the 'hieros', of the "sacred". That is: in the conception engraved within the word 'hierarchy', the ruler is precisely closer to the sacred, thus to the divine, thus to the high of the skies in contraposition to the low of the mundane (a religious-spatial dichotomy which can be found already in Plato's 'ideas' and Aristotle's 'ether'). In other words, within our traditional graphic conception of hierarchy, its own etymological origin situates the source of authority in the upper level of a pyramid, in its high sphere, and not in its low one. This does not only institute an organization where someone rules and someone is ruled, but it also establishes the understanding that the low-side of such relationship is only relevant in as much as it "obeys and lets itself be led". This lower-end is not only stripped of power but it is also placed, permanently, on the margins of all discourse. This is what seems to be taking place within film production studies: the uncritical approach to a hierarchical
45 organization leads to discourses limited to the high spheres while disregards those without the authority, the 'archy'. The reason for this lays in an unnoticed misconception which can also find solution within a deeper observation of the etymological meaning and origin of 'hierarchy': the origin of the Latin word 'archia' (from which 'archy' stems) does not stop at 'arkhos', meaning "leader, chief, ruler" (who in ancient Greece were named the 'arkhon'), but instead at a more primal word: 'arkhe'. 'Arkhe' means "beginning, origin, first place", or "to begin from" (Harper). This etymological origin of the word 'archy' as 'arkhe' (or, in its Latin version, arche), meaning ultimate principle, situates 'archy' not as just the place from which power originates, but firstly the place around which everything else revolves; the ontological essence or primal condition which rules and underlines everything else. It is this arche that the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers searched: it was water for Thales of Miletus, fire for Heraclitus of Ephesus, the "atom" for Democritus, the "ideas" for Plato, "matter" for Aristotle, and "God" for the medieval philosophers. That arche was considered the ontological heart of the universe, that which pumps the blood that makes the world exist and function as it does. Therefore, 'hierarchy' does not exclusively refer to a "high (or sacred) chief" but also, and originally, to a "high (or sacred) origin". Therefore, the first and primary move that hierarchy, as a concept, does is placing this arche, this essential and primal origin of all, in the high in contraposition to a low. That is, it makes the former the center of the system, the cause, while naming the latter a mere satellite to it, its effect. As such, all attempt to understand the whole is demanded to conceive such system according to this division and to conceptualize the 'margins' accordingly, first, to the (so-declared) 'center'. This, if approached uncritically, is what leads to the naturalization of conceptions which are not natural; like Nietzsche denounced in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, it is like placing a candle in the sky, forgetting to bring it down, and then calling it a star, proud of our discovery as if full of knowledge (Nietzsche); it is what leads film production and film production studies to the naturalization of hierarchy within film production, to the uncritical acceptance of high authorship as the central origin of creative activity in detriment and disregard of low authorship. It is this that has placed the 'mode of production' in the bull's eye of film studies instead of those low-level, every day practices that are required to create a film; even when supervised by a "high producer".
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Let there be no mistake, the discussion at hand is about the ontology of filmmaking: of what is the essence, the primal and basic element that is the commanding force, the originating principle, the radically necessary part of the act of making a film. Of what should be the focus of attention when considering, realizing or studying film production. Of whether the essential cause lies on the high spheres established by the modes of production's divisions of power and authorship, or on whether it lies in the ignored low authorship of "production practices".
socialdivision of labor Figure 12.
conception mode of conception production authorship (authorship & authorship
structure) detailed division of labor of division detailed
execution low authorship production execution practices product product
3.2 Production Practices
Then, what does this low authorship of 'production practices' consist of? What are these 'production practices' so as to distinguish themselves from the 'mode of production', so as to articulate a different ontology of film production? According to scholar Antoni Roig Telo 'practices' are "sets of interconnected and routinized everyday activities" (translation by author19, "Participatory Film" 2318), which, if we center our attention on them, "force attention away from texts or structure onto what people are actually doing, or at least, what they say they do" ("Participatory Film" 2312). Therefore, the arche situates itself within production; not in text-product or structure but with the everyday practices (relationships, doings and makings) of the producers themselves — in the most literal sense of the word 'producer'. These practices having, just like the modes of production, very clear nodes of articulation that T. R. Schatzki divides in three components: "understandings related to the practice, explicit rules (or procedures) of the practice, and finally, affectivity (motivations, emotions, goals, beliefs, moods, engagement) linked to the practice" (qtd. in Roig Telo "Participatory Film" 2319) or, in
19 All excerpts from Roig Telo's texts are translations from Spanish by the author.
47 other words, "understandings, procedures, and affectivity" (Roig Telo "Participatory Film" 2321). It is this alternative center of production which guided and conceptualized the early cameraman system, for example, as studied by Charles Musser and Peter C. Sellors, before the separation of conception and execution with the introduction of the mode of production's high authorship. It is also this other potential arche for film studies which would justify a concentration on the (essential) remains of social division of labor in film production, instead of merely considering detailed division of labor and its hierarchical structures, and ignoring the former. These practices (or, in our particular interest, 'production practices') offer an alternative system of organization, an alternative primal force, to that of the mode of production, in a deeply ontological sense. For one, these production practices are a "domain of social life" in as much as they are "explicit rules and regulations, as well as implicit rules that shape what is considered the 'right' way to do things in specific contexts", defining "normativity, hierarchies among participants, and expectations" and tending to establish that which is then "tacitly accepted as natural" (Roig Telo "Participatory Film" 2319). Though these 'uncontrolled' practices are capable of leading to the same results of "hierarchy among participants", just like a mode of production, the essential difference is that these "practices are neither strictly established nor stable. Instead, they are socially and culturally constructed, and governed by rules both explicit and implicit" (Roig Telo 2320). Precisely this characteristic is what led, in the first place, to the elimination of the practice-based cameraman system through the introduction of the modes of production in the Hollywood industry, because these practices are not consistent, not predictable or externally controllable a priori, as the will vary and adapt to all changing circumstances or the different groupings of people; something very undesirable one the priority is an unilateral control of authorship. In the words of scholar Alan Warde: "practices also contain the seeds of constant change. They are dynamic by virtue of their own internal logic of operation, as people in myriad situations adapt, improvise and experiment" (qtd. in Roig Telo "Participatory Film" 2321). Precisely this connects them with a "collective intention" and a non-hierarchical authorships, for constant and disorganized change implies a certain readiness "to accept that others can contribute to shaping and achieving the shared will" (Sellors 124). Though practices can be studied as "everyday and inertial", as tendencies, this does not mean they are necessarily "routine, homogeneous, repetitive or stable" (Roig Telo
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"Participatory Film" 2321), for they do not follow blueprints set on stone. Furthermore, this causes that "a practice approach holds practitioners to be those who are 'enacting' the practice. This means acknowledging all the agents involved as participants" (Roig Telo "Participatory Film" 2320) with no regard to their status and, in consequence, not considering as "practitioners" those who are not "enacting" the practice. That is: on the one hand, this conception places the director as equally participant (as a starting point) as her or his camera operator or light technician and, on the other hand, it excludes the non-enacting 'high authors' from being, strictly, considered as "practitioners", even if their names come up in the film's credits. This does not only turn around the logic upon which Hollywood conceives itself and the hierarchical conception of film production that centers on the distribution of high authorships, but it also defies and challenges academic conceptions which have embraced this mentality uncritically as the basis for their analyses. These conceptions of 'higharchy' are not unique to film studies though: they parallel the early XX century obsession of nation-States with "high modernism", which James C. Scott describes as "[the] administrative ordering of nature and society" (88) in his book Seeing Like a State. This is what has led, in Scott's study, to the ignoring of that 'lowarchy' which the urbanist Jane Jacobs calls the "social order" of an "almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves" (qtd. in Scott 135). Even though that which is the essence of the subjects in question (be it Scott's societies, Jacobs' cities or film production practices) is not the administrative and burocratic eagle's view of that "high modernism" but, instead, in the ignored everyday "domain of social life" (Roig Telo "Participatory Film" 2319) and its "microsociology" (Jacobs qtd. in Scott 136) of life processes.
The metaphor that comes to mind in this connection is that of an army drawn up on the parade ground as opposed to an army engaged in combat with the enemy. In the first case is a tidy visual order created by units and ranks drawn up in straight lines. But it is an army doing nothing, an army on display. An army at war will not display the same orderly arrangement, but it will be, in Jacob's terms, an army doing what is was trained to do. (Scott 134)
Just like the army can be studied and conceived from its disposition in parades and organizational charts, so can film production be studied and conceived from its disposition in modes of production and organizational diagrams —as this text has been
49 doing until now. Yet, for all the usefulness this may have, the ontological essence and sense of both army and film production is a different one than that shown in said charts and diagrams: to engage in combat and to engage in filmmaking, respectively. Both of which demand an arrangement completely different (both in functioning and conception), when not opposed, to that of the parade or the mode of production. Nevertheless within film production (at least), studies continues to stem from the 'parade model' instead of the 'engagement' one. Instead, it would seem that both institutions, the army and the film production, exist first and foremost for (and because of) shooting, and not the opposite. Thus, why do we continue centered on the identification, study and reification of authorial directors-generals —through deep analyses of their mental processes and artistic backgrounds/influences— or on the orderings, roles and ranks of the diverse departments-regiments, trying to decide where to place them on the parade line and with what medals, instead of on the everyday practices and interactions of a director with the talent and crew, which condition and make the 'shoot' take place? That is: why not shift our focus on to how precisely, through which practices, is a particular film made20? With the production structure as its conditional context —and thus as valuable knowledge— but not as its origin or essence.
3.3 The Naissance of a Tradition
This change of focus is one already found in James C. Scott's sociological study, in Jane Jacobs regarding urbanism, or in the origins of anarchist theory, as expressed in Pierre- Joseph Proudhon's De l'Utilité de la Célébration du dimanche in 1839 (Cohn 4). But it can also be found in regards to the arts, particularly in two cases that I would like to bring to the forefront: the change of perspective proposed in the fields of film history and spectatorship studies by the "New Cinema History" and the approach taken by certain theatre production studies, particularly as manifested in the works of Fabrizio Cruciani. To start with the first, New Cinema History is an approach to film history which defends the experience of the spectator in contrast to the "transhistorical spectator"
20 This would seem to lead to a singular conception of film production, with no possibility to generalization and demanding a one-on-one study of every single film production, preventing a serious or encompassing study of film production. Yet, these could not be further away from the truth, as tendencies can be found and categorized in between different approaches to film production within its different phases or areas —as I have been proposing through diagrams until now. At least, this is not further away from the truth than the study of the Hollywood studio system through the mode of production, for there is not a single studio which completely embodies the 'studio system'; rather, this concept, is a mere abstraction from all its particular manifestations (Staiger 281).
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(Allen 266). Or, in other words, which wishes to make a "history of the experience of cinema" (Allen 266) instead of one based on the text (the film) or on abstract considerations of the spectator. This field proposes the transition from, what we could call, the 'high' consideration of the spectator, as if seen from above in the style of the high modernist architects denounced by Scott, to a ground-level, concrete and personal consideration of the spectator. One which considers our relationship with cinema, as audience, as one connected with the "overall field of our cultural experiences" (Maltby 11) and not isolated from them. That is: a consideration of filmgoing (and, thus, film) as a "social act … of far greater consequence than the cultural activity of seeing films" (Annette Kuhn qtd. in Maltby 10). This maneuver within the studies of film history and spectatorship is exactly the same I would like to propose for the field of film production studies: just as spectatorship is not merely considered as a question of numbers but as a "social practice of moviegoing" (Allen 266, own italics) which demands the scholar (but also the distributor) to consider film spectatorship as an everyday interaction; so film production may be considered be considered not as merely numbers or 'parades' but —paraphrasing previous quotes— as a "social act, a social practice of moviemaking, of far greater consequence than the cultural activity of seeing films or of conceiving them". New Cinema History sets a precedent for the separation of text (product) from the value of the experience (production) and for a defense of that experience's social and personal relevance. On the other hand, and in continuation, the theatre production studies tradition exemplified in the works of Fabrizio Cruciani presents us with an example of how such a change in perspective may be realized within the studies of film production21. For, though theatre and filmmaking have their obvious differences (theatre's ephemeral nature in contrast to film's 'fixed' one), they also have many shared elements (directors, actors, lightning, producers, sound, design, performance,…) and similar work processes (rehearsals, divided work specializations, production processes not part of the final product, a performative aspect,…). It is precisely their differences which have encouraged theatre to study its production processes with an alternative model to that predominant in cinema: in theatre, as the 'past' performances cannot be re-lived in their
21 Cruciani is a particularly rich example as he very consciously takes this approach in the here quoted book Registi pedagogi e communità teatrali nel Novecento, but also in other texts with other priorities in mind such as Lo spazio del teatro or Promemoria del teatro di strada. Even then, this is a very common and unconsciously accepted approach in theatre, both by scholars (for example, Arthur Sainer in The Radical Theatre Notebook or Elie Konigson in L'espace théâtral médiéval) and directors (for example, Peter Brook in The Empty Space or Marco Martinelli in Aristofane a Scampia).
51 original form (as a filmed version alters the medium), the only solution left to study past creators has been not to focus on the (non-existent) products but, instead, on their production methods and practices. In cinema, instead, the approach has been the opposite as the products stand the passing of time and we can closely analyze and interpret any detail of the film we are interested in, over and over again; the how is considered to be all in the text. Therefore, film production studies have centered not on the practices (for we do have the result those practices chased after) but on the structures which organized and conditioned the creation of that product, to try and identify the 'originators' of such products; the (single) 'authors' of that text we obsessively analyze. My thesis is, instead, that film production studies (and film production's own conception of itself) could learn a lot from adopting this particular approach to theatre, even if film also gets to conserve the results of those productions. What is more, I would say that having the resulting product (the film) does not help us at all to understand how such a product was reached, so that we may learn about filmmaking and film. I would argue that it is this alternative approach (found in theatre studies but also applied by New Cinema History) which may allow us to denaturalize hierarchy in film production and allow us to place film production within its broader context as a "social act", not reduced to the showing or finishing of a film. This alternative approach would consist of what theatre director and renovator Jean Copeau called the "tradition de la naissance", meaning "what is in a state of birth" in contrast to how 'tradition' is usually understood: "how it has always been done" (Cruciani 195). For Copeau, as thought by Cruciani, there is a tradition of Molière embalmed to the institution of the Comédie Française, and then there is the tradition de la naissance tied to Molière (Cruciani 196). Therefore, the same could be said of Federico Fellini and the 'auteur cinema', Howard Hawkes and the 'studio system', John Cassavetes and 'independent cinema' or Agnès Varda and 'documentary film'; there is a tradition "embalmed" to their 'institutions' and films, and a tradition de la naissance tied to them themselves and their filmmaking practices.
Copeau explains it like this: to conserve the tradition of an artist which has come before us, we must try to recover the reasons and the ways according to which her or his work has been created. The true tradition is that of the creative journey which has made possible that particular work. And because of this the true
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tradition of Molière consists in re-understanding and continuing the way in which Molière made theatre. Not in recovering the theatre made by Molière. (translation by author22, Cruciani 196)
Though this does not make the text —"the theatre made by Molière"— irrelevant. Rather,
Copeau is a great defender of the written text. But in a precise sense: the written text is that which the past has given us. But it is a result. If we appropriate ourselves of the creative journey which has led to that result, if we understand how Molière has managed to write L'Avare, and we reproduce today —not L'Avare— but Molière's journey to arrive to L'Avare, we conquer for ourselves that tradition." (Cruciani 196).
This approach presents us precisely with that change of arche which centers its attention in the production practices of the past —so as to build a tradition de naissance and not (as maybe contemporary director Peter Brook would have put it) a "deadly" one. One which looks at the past in search of what Aristotle called a phronesis or 'practical wisdom' in contrast to a theoretical one. This points to two very important notions: firstly, that it is only though the understanding of production practices that we can truly understand how a product comes to be; because, secondly, it is only through the disposition of certain production practices that a product comes to be. Thus, this radically re-orientates not only our study of the past but also our practices in the present in regards to film production and filmmaking. Particularly, it is a radical step away from Hollywood 's starting point for the study of the Hollywood studio system —"we must see production practices as an effect of filmic [stylistic] practices" (Staiger 6). Instead, what this defends is that production practices are the cause of filmic-stylistic practices: the reason that Hollywood had so homogenous styles was because of its tight grip on production practices through the mode of production, as I have argued in Chapter 1. But understanding the how of those styles demands more than merely knowing Frank Capra's position within the studio; it demands to know how Capra shot —which implies more than knowing how he moved the camera. Therefore, Cruciani, just as the theatre directors he is analyzing, escapes "from the discourse of Theatre to see the operating and the producing of the men of theatre"
22 All quotes belonging to Cruciani's text have been translated from Italian by the author. 53
(Cruciani 40); from the study of the institution and its modes of production to the particularity of the people making theatre (or film). Instead of studying these directors, as they have been remembered, for their performances and theories, he studies them for the concrete relationships they have created (Cruciani 40). For how their particular work came to be through the particularities of the relations that, necessarily, were built for and during that creative process and which gave way to that creative product. This is why he calls these directors the "director-pedagogues" (44); because pedagogy is conceived as "a moment of creation and not of transmission, of education and not of teaching" (40) —of process and production, and not of product and institution. A theatre (or cinema) founded not on theatre, but on the people who make theatre (Cruciani 75). In consequence, what Cruciani analyzes of the works of Copeau, Konstantin Stanislavski or of agitprop groups in the Weimar Republic or revolutionary Russia are their attention and work in regards to the articulation of relationships and experiences. For example, when he studies how Copeau founded a theatre and, in a year and half, made it the most important theatre in early XX century Paris, Cruciani does not concentrate on the works he made or on what was the 'mode of production' of his production company. Though he does mention them, what he truly considers relevant to Copeau's production process, and to identify that tradition de naissance, instead are: his principles articulating his practice of "order" in regards to oneself and of "duration" — as in the ability to change to stay coherent to oneself—, his circle of supporting friends and connections through the Nouvelle Revue Française, his decision to found his theatre in a neighborhood without a "nucleus of social relationships", the economic impossibility of his project which caused a mobilization in its favor, its creation of a community were Copeau himself can be found cleaning the floor in the morning or were famous writer-friends can be found selling tickets at the entrance, its creation of a school which educates and creates a public and "network" for its performances, the search for actors and actresses who first and foremost believed in him and his methods (which included monastery-like summer rehearsals with discourses on high culture), the closing of the theatre upon its success and the 'exile' to the pastures of Bourgogne where they realize diverse workshops without any performances in mind,… (197-205) Cruciani has told us practically nothing of the particularities of how Copeau built his performances; actually, we do not even have a single image of what one of Copeau's performances looked like, just some of his source material. Yet, a broad and deep exposition of the reasons behind Copeau's motivations, principles and methods for
54 making theatre have been presented: his practices; the arche of his production. We may not be able to reproduce Copeau's works, but we can reproduce Copeau's theatre.
3.4 An Other Ontology of Filmmaking
It is not that this approach is extrinsic to cinema and film studies; there are many studies on the lives, works and practices of directors such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Vigo, John Ford, Charles Chaplin or Jean Renoir, or on the practices characteristic to "classical" Hollywood, the Nouvelle Vague and Third or World Cinemas. Yet these studies are rarely considered as sources for the study of film production itself and, when they are (as it is more common in practical film studies, for example) they are reduced to "filmic practices" (as Staiger calls them) or, in other words, to the 'stylistic' practices which use the medium's specificity to reach one or another aesthetic look in the final product. That is, these 'studies' which could lead to an approach similar to that of Cruciani or of the New Cinema History are taken in one of two ways: or 1) in an abstract manner completely disconnected to a broader production process (multiple people and multiple phases) embedded in a socio-historical-political context and which are, thus, valued merely as "filmic practices" —of authors— instead of production practices —of filmmakers—, or 2) as something merely subservient to and a consequence of the mode of production which is uncritically accepted as natural, or not even identified nor recognized. These texts and experiences are rarely conceived (or rarely read for) the production practices as founders of a "social act", of a tradition to be inherited, of a way of producing which is deeply engrained in the particularity of the relationships it creates and foments within a social (and personal) context, as the center for understanding production. Instead, they are read as abstractions connected to a product disconnected from its material and social origin (or from the processes and people that led to them), or as different styles to be realized within an uncritically accepted structure of production (the tradition of "how it has always been done"), when not as a psychoanalytical door into the directors' obsessions as if that would allow us to understand how or why a director got the results she or he did (within the collaborative nature of filmmaking). There are some approaches, though, which have attempted to take this route within film studies. All of them, interestingly enough, do so to present or highlight an alternative tradition of reference within the history of cinema; but by doing so, they also defend a different way of conceiving cinema and its relationship with production. One
55 of these are the —already mentioned in the previous chapter— 'CineSinAutor', but their approach falls closer to the construction of an alternative mode of production than in merely focusing in production practices, even if they are given a high degree of importance. On the other hand, in a manner similar to Cruciani's, there are two particular approaches which, in an attempt to 'give birth' to different traditions of reference within cinema, have, both, utilized this production practices-based conception and, as well, highlighted it as fundamental within their own subjects of study: such is the case of Gilles Mouëllic's study of improvisation methods and practices in filmmaking in Improvising Cinema or the feminist analysis of contemporary and female US independent filmmaking in Indie Reframed: Women's Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema, edited by Linda Badley, Clair Perkins and Michele Schreiber. The first, Mouëllic's study, presents improvisation not only as something possible in cinema but as one of its possible (and mostly ignored) traditions; one which he precisely approaches in the style of Cruciani's tradition de la naissance. This tradition of improvisation, which he links to jazz and in opposition to the Romantics' defense of text over invention (Mouëllic 9), "views the creative process as a journey, or even a sketch or a draft" where "each shot is an event in itself and not the representation of an event" (Mouëllic 11). It is precisely in this questioning of the dominance of the written word in which Mouëllic considers that the works of Jean Renoir, Jacques Rivette, Jean Rouch, Maurice Pialat, John Cassavetes, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Johan Van der Keuken or Roberto Rossellini, among others, can be considered as a "trend spanning the history of cinema" (15). Thus, what Mouëllic delves into is, for example, the different practices through which these diverse directors lead improvisation-based shoots. One case he studies is how these directors' "directing from inside approach" (121) has several variants or possibilities: by joining the actors, as another character, and leading the improvisation —like Jean Renoir in La règle du jeu (1939)— (121), through involvement and improvisation with the camera as the cameraman —like John Cassavetes in Faces (1968)— (128-129), by use of actor 'delegates' who guide improvisations in representation of the director —used by Éric Rohmer— (129-134), or through mixes of professional and non-professional talent —as Cassavetes in Husbands (1970)— (131).
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This disregard for the pre- Image 2. written text presents a division of all filmmakers into two tendencies: "those who defend preliminary structure and the immutability of the written word versus those who are determined to view the shoot as a performance" (Mouëllic 15). For In La règle du jeu, Jean Renoir "directs from inside" by acting as the character 'Octave' (on the left) alongside Roland Toutain's 'André Jurieux' these production practice he and Nora Gregor's 'Christine de la Cheyniest'. [IMDb. Nora Gregor, Jean Renoir and Roland Toutain in La règle du jeu (1939). June 2018. analyzes directly stand against the
57 productions as marketing techniques or by critics as arguments for the mastery of a certain film; improvisation implies practices that "deliberately cast the spotlight on improvisation as the instigator of unprecedented forms of expression" (Mouëllic 10). Fourthly, the kind of relationships established are completely different not only because of the different conception of the shoot, but also because the nature of improvisation requires a nurturing of "an atmosphere of trust that can pave the way for the ultimate 'letting go'" (Mouëllic 64); an atmosphere of care that becomes essential for the realization of the film itself. And from where does cinema take many of its lessons? From theatre, one of the most determined fields to follow jazz's "improvisation bandwagon" of finding techniques for the involved creation of a "creative act underpinned by collective ambition" (Mouëllic 16). The relevance of all this, of this approach, is that, in truth, all these points are not less valid or important for a classical Hollywood shoot; the creation of the product still heavily relies and depends on the creativity of the lower levels of production to create and realize what has been conceived from above (which never includes all the implications, problems, details or possibilities of the process for the final product). As mentioned in previous chapters, these low authorships and social divisions of labor do not cease to exist in Hollywood production, they are just buried and unattended. Mouëllic's approach and study highlights and brings to the forefront that which is common, essential, to any successful film production, be it collaborative, artsy, independent or commercial Hollywood: collaboration, the innovation upon the (guiding) written text which requires a certain improvisation (even if mostly reserved to a minority) and a working network of relationships within the shoot. These have merely been sidelined by obsessions with product and modes of production. And this other approach is what would allow to take the center of attention back into that which is, in the end, the absolute origin and prime requirement for the making of a film: its production practices. It is these same method which Indie Reframed brings forward in its feminist analysis of women's filmmaking in US independent cinema, at least in its "Collaborations" chapters (the "Production" one is saved for mode of production-based analyses). In the first of these, by Chris Holmlund, the concept of "mutual muses" (Holmlund 257) pops up in contrast to the Romantic ideal of the woman who is the man's inspiration. Here, the notion of "muse" becomes something not about "inspiration" but about "collaboration" during the production process itself, upon a basis
58 of "friendship and alliance" (Holmlund 257). These approach allows for a different consideration of production, of the sharing of creative processes and of authorship, particularly in making the muse-relationship a bilateral one, where "inspiration" demands two active subjects, and not one passive object (typically, the actress). These opens the doors to production practices based on non-hierarchical relationships which, yet, acknowledge the differences in between "partners" (Holmlund 258); a recognition and acceptance of 'difference' which resonates with the philosophical thinking of Luce Irigaray in regards to gender and partnership, but also explains the essence of a social division of labor. These "collaborative methods", as named by Corinn Columpar in the following chapter (276), open up an alternative and "vital feminist tradition of cultural production" (Columpar 279) which makes evident the "lack of critical paradigms capable of recognizing, let alone naming, those aforementioned acts of affiliation, cooperation, and mutual exchange" (Columpar 277) which characterize the production practices of these women filmmakers. Therefore denouncing the lack of critical models which allow to think alternative paradigms of film production, particularly ones centered around production practices as social exchanges, in contrast and distinction to the (white and male) dominant conceptions of "power, authority and autonomy" (Columpar 295) focused, thus, on modes of production and stylistic demonstrations. Just as in Cruciani's "director-pedagogue" or in Mouëllic's improvising director/filmmaker, these women filmmaker's alternative conception of production practices reinvents the role of the director to one of "facilitator" and "curator", in the words of filmmaker Lynn Shelton, referenced in the third text, by John Alberti (297). This alternative conception not only points, as in Cruciani and Mouëllic, to the creation of a filming experience which is "positive … for everybody" and which makes everyone an active participant (Alberti 288) but also to how the dominant and mode of production-centric models have engendered the "intractable gender imbalance of who gets to direct movies" (Alberti 288); an "imbalance" of filmic, social, personal, and political repercussions. Though all these approaches are nonetheless very much centered around the directors, they signal a different approach to the "subject-position" (Alberti 301) of directing; first and foremost, they, through the director as coordinator and not commander, highlight the need for a change of production practices which expands further than the director or its close circle; it expands to the whole system of production and all those involved. It, very importantly, makes the distinction of what Bookchin
59 calls "policy making and administration": the difference in between filmmaker "assemblies" and those who "administer" the decisions of that assembly —the distinction of logistical problems from political ones (Bookchin qtd. in Biehl 178). The director may solve the logistical problem but production practices solve the political (and creative) one; because this change of perception, of center, is not merely for social, emotional, political, and personal reasons (which in themselves should be enough), but also for purely creative and practical reasons regarding the final product (Alberti 303). This is the importance of production practices which seek to train not merely artists but whole persons (Cruciani 35); which recognize production as a group search for answers yet unknown (Mouëllic 165); which end the reified idea of the auteur —the "lone white male director"— legitimized as a despot (Badley et. al. 17; Alberti 301) in favor of a (feminist) "reimagining and restructuring the material and aesthetic practices of Hollywood to demonstrate the economic efficiency of more inclusive and democratic production methods" (Alberti 302). In conclusion, this proposed "change of arche" which centers its sights on the production practices of filmmaking, those relationships and actions through which the film itself is brought to 'life' on an everyday basis, is what might allow us not only to understand the processes behind the making of the film in regards to their how and what they have to say in regards to authorship, but also to allow film studies and film production to shake themselves out of the shackles of uncritically accepted hierarchical models of production legitimized by mode of production-based analyses. Moreover, this proposal is not extracted from the blue but, instead and firstly, finds its comparison within other fields of film studies (in the New Cinema History approach) and in theatre's thoroughly practiced and thought production practices. Furthermore, and nonetheless, this approach is one which already finds answer within diverse filmic practices and discourses, particularly in those regarding improvisation in cinema and the feminist critique and practice of film production. Particularly these last two, in consonance with Cruciani's calls for a tradition de la naissance, not only approach the their filmmakers of interest as, firstly, practitioners instead of embalmed institutions, but also as references for an alternative tradition of cinema; a cinema of naissance; a tradition where the arche is in the filmmakers themselves and the relationships which intertwine with their practices. An approach which is not contradictory or foreign to the discourse on Hollywood production (as Badley, Perkin and Schreiber's compilation emphasizes) but which presents, in itself, a differentiated ontological conception of film
60 production. One where the origin and the essence of production is in the production practices of filmmakers as artists and as persons, instead of in the modes of production of titles and ranks. One which, along with Alison Butler's "women's minor cinema", eliminates the binarisms of popular/elitist, avant-garde/mainstream, positive/negative (in Badler et. al. 16) of which, for example, CineSinAutor does not undo itself from. And having a tradition is of primary importance, for to be able to truly confront oneself, to cause change from inside so as to create a new future (Cruciani 208), one needs to have a strong identity, that is, "the possibility of identifying oneself with a tradition" (Cruciani 195). What tradition? The dominant answer has been: that of the auteur, that of the modes of production, that of hierarchical authorship. This chapter highlights how an alternative tradition exists, which is in naissance, but which already is part of our past and, thus, may be so of film's future. A tradition based on an alternative arche to that which has been previously called to our attention. An arche of film's production practices; "not to demolish or even circumvent, but to reframe the now hoary model of the maverick male auteur" (Badler et. al. 17) and his hierarchical mode of production. A tradition of filmmaking as a "social act", embedded in a social, historical and political context, which conceives itself as process, as experience, and not as result. A tradition which presents an other conception of the essence filmmaking, of its ontology. One which places the arche not in the "rule of a high priest" —belonging to that original 'hierarkhia'— but, rather, in the heresy —from the original 'hairesis'— of a "deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, practice" (Harper), in its capacity for "taking or choosing for oneself" (Harper). An everyday and everchanging heresy —in that original etymological sense— of those production practices which propose a new arche, an alternative arkhia, an other ontology for filmmaking and film production studies. Not a high and divine one, but a low and mundane one. The ontology and (production) practices of a herarchy.
CONCLUSION. The nature of filmmaking.
In conclusion, the overarching thesis of this essay is that the ontology of filmmaking, resides not in the higharchy of modes of production and their hierarchical high authorships —as it has been mostly approached by film production studies— but, instead, in the lowarchy found in the production practices of filmmaking. That it is in
61 this everyday and engaged level of production that the essential arche of filmmaking's nature lays. This claim presents several implications for film production studies: the first is an expansion and alteration of the theoretical framework which has been dominant in (at least) North-Western film production studies. This is radically signaled by the introduction of a critical attentiveness to the presence of hierarchical relationships in production, stemming from anarchist theory, and —not less significantly— by the inclusion of the notion of 'authorship' as central to the discussion regarding film production, as influenced by Sellor's and CineSinAutor's theses. The analysis and close study of the theoretical framework established by Staiger's founding work on the mode of production allows to highlight several misguided and/or limited conceptions. The first: the blindness to hierarchy as a central and continuous characteristic of Hollywood's modes of production. Secondly, academia's uncritical embracement of hierarchy, without recognizing its historical contingency —against the evidence of the Hollywood's first, and non-hierarchical, production system: the cameraman system. Thirdly, this critically blindfolded approach to Hollywood has lead to the constitution of a conceptual apparatus that accepts and articulates itself along the premises accepted by the subject of study itself. This three points have, precisely, lead to an implicit notion of authorship (an auteur one) that ignores the structurally hierarchical relationships that conform and allow it. As such, the notion of 'authorship' itself has been identified in film studies with a very concrete type of authorship: a 'high' authorship identified with the moment of 'conception', not necessarily linked to that of 'execution'. This, added to a lack of attentiveness for hierarchy, 'hid' the presence of a 'low' authorship: those participating in the execution but not in the conception of the production process. Instead, it would seem that this moment is not only the ontologically most essential moment of a film production (for it is the moment that materializes the film) but also one were one can find a organization of labor that had been relegated to the pages of history: a collective- like 'social' division of labor that had dominated early filmmaking. Under the shadow of the hierarchical —and authorial— 'detailed' division of labor, this other division of labor presents, both, non-hierarchical production relationships and collective notions of authorship. What is more, it is primarily constituted by that which, under the paradigm of the 'mode of production', was a mere footnote to the production process: the 'production practices'.
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In consequence, these new concepts alter the understanding of what is a mode of production and place it within a broader sociopolitical and anthropological context, questioning the theoretical frames through which we have attempted to grasp the essence of film production. They point towards the necessity of critically approaching our subjects of study and our own conceptual premises. We must ask ourselves, do our concepts articulate that which is essential and natural to film production's being, to its ontology, or are they based upon biased and accidental —if valid— historical contingencies like hierarchy, single authorship and detailed division of labor? Is the 'mode of production' truly the purest way to approach the act of making a film, or does the path lay elsewhere? May it be, as I propose, in transforming those dismissed 'production practices' into our new arche? What this would imply, in second place, is a methodological passage: having the production practices as our most basic unit of analysis, rather than the mode of production, would allow us to analyze, think and organize all kinds of film productions, without regards to their modes of production or varying organizations of authorship: from the hierarchies of Hollywood, articulated by a detailed division of labor (with its surviving social one), to the horizontal production of collaborative cinemas, with their social division of labor, or the no-division of labor-based productions of CineSinAutor. In contrast, having the mode of production as the starting point for our analyses leads to the paradox of film production which Staiger, Bordwell and Thompson presented and, yet —as Musser points out—, failed to answer:
"In filmmaking mass production never reached the assembly-line degree of rigidity that it did in other industries. Rather it remained a manufacturing division of labor with craftsmen collectively and serially producing a commodity." (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson qtd. in Musser 98).
From the mode of production-based approach to film production, this "riddle" will hardly be explainable, just as a collaborative cinema will be incomprehensible further than that it is 'collaborative', i.e. "they work together". But, what does this mean? How does this work? A mode of production-based method will lead us to the diagrams I have proposed through the thesis. These, while useful, will hardly help us understand how this 'paradoxical' Hollywood system actually worked; how precisely did craftsmen work collectively and yet produce a serially produced commodity? On the other hand, the optic of a methodology centered around production practices will explain Bordwell,
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Staiger and Thompson's 'paradox' by precisely analyzing how that "producing" actually took place; just as defining Cassavetes as an 'improvisational/collective production' would say little about his production process, studying his production practices instead —intimate relationships and "directing from the inside" methods— allows us to understand much more of such film production. What this puts into question is, what is the objective of our methods? What do we seek to understand with 'film production studies'? Is it merely how film production is organized? Or should our methods be oriented towards how film production is actually produced? My claim is that the dominant, mode of production approach limits itself to those productions that fit its categories and divisions of authorship and structure: it holds onto a tradition of filmmaking understood as an institution, as an industry of numbers, single authors and bosses. This text proposes a production practices-based approach of a new, nascent, tradition: of an alternative categorization of film production (e.g. of directors as pedagogues, of directors as improvisers, of directors as facilitators,...), of film production as embedded within social and emotional relationships and contexts, of a tradition that must stretch itself in search of the production practices of cinemas mostly ignored (in other times, in other continents, in other blindspots,...). My thesis is that only by these production practices may we truly approximate ourselves to an understanding of the act of film-making. The question I would like to revolve to the field of film production studies and to the film production industry itself is: will we conform ourselves with anything less than the ontology of filmmaking? What is it that essentially makes (or un-makes) a film? Where are its fundamental tensions? Is it in a film production's mode of production? Or is it in its production practices? Around which arche should we build our conceptualization of filmmaking itself? Why have professionals, amateurs and scholars alike embraced hierarchy and authorship, while disregarded production practices? The answers will not only condition how we study, approach and construct the constellation-like concepts of film production, but also what is the center of gravity around which practitioners and industry should be articulating their productions.
You will have noticed that the train of thought we are about to conclude only requires of the writer one thing: reflect, think about his/her position in the process of production. (translation by author, Benjamin 97)
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