Notes on the Politics of the <Em>Auteur</Em>: Stanley Kubrick
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Colby College Digital Commons @ Colby Honors Theses Student Research 2013 Notes on the Politics of the Auteur: Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, and the Spectator Michael Perreault Colby College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons Colby College theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed or downloaded from this site for the purposes of research and scholarship. Reproduction or distribution for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of the author. Recommended Citation Perreault, Michael, "Notes on the Politics of the Auteur: Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, and the Spectator" (2013). Honors Theses. Paper 694. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/694 This Honors Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. Notes on the Politics of the Auteur: Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, and the Spectator By: Michael Perreault Honors Thesis Colby College Independent Study Program Advisor: Steve Wurtzler © 2013 Table of Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 3 Part One: Kubrick, Text, Affect 1.1. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the [Sign] .......................... 9 1.2. La Politique des auteurs ........................................................................................................................... 17 1.3. Affect and the Politics of Humor .......................................................................................................... 20 1.4. Eyes Wide Shut, or: How I Learned to Start Worrying ................................................................ 24 Figure 1: Eyes Wide Shut Promotional Poster ....................................................................................... 30 1.5. Masks ............................................................................................................................................................... 30 1.6. Criticism as an Art ...................................................................................................................................... 40 1.7. Napoleon and Unfinished Business..................................................................................................... 46 Part Two: Realignments 2.1. “Authors” and Author-Functions; or: Criticism as Science ....................................................... 56 Table 1: Ideas About the Phenomenological Construction of the “Author” ............................. 61 2.2. Film Buffs and Other Spectators .......................................................................................................... 62 Part Three: “Anderson,” Commodity, Identity 3.1. Toward Consuming the “Author” ........................................................................................................ 67 Figure 2: Wes Anderson Bingo .................................................................................................................... 70 Figure 3: Anderson’s American Express Commercial ....................................................................... 80 3.2. Works of Art ................................................................................................................................................. 81 3.3 Moonrise Kingdom and the Nostalgic Commodity ......................................................................... 88 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................................................... 94 2 Introduction What is an author, and what does it matter? These questions about authority in the cinema have been the subject of often-heated debate since the late 1940s, when Alexandre Astruc posited the notion of the caméra-stylo in France. A slightly reductive understanding of the term “auteur”—a term that Cahiers du Cinéma would later adopt—states that, with the shadow of the World War II era of censorship still looming in the 1950s, the many indi- vidual voices of the cinema needed to be both heard and promoted. Namely, the director should be regarded as (and should consider his or her primary objective to serve as) an audiovisual “voice” who uses the cinema to not only relate a personal statement, but to do so by crossing over the limits of written text to depict his or her version of reality. The cin- ema, as Astruc and Cahiers critics André Bazin and François Truffaut conceived it, was evolving into a political medium for directors to interrogate hegemonic structures while expressing themselves aesthetically and poetically. In keeping with what some have called Romantic, Judeo-Christian, or Occidental traditions of ascribing all expressive elements of a film or body of films to a singular Author, these French critics developed a policy of critiqu- ing authorship that remained dominant until the 1960s, but that also shaped the founda- tions of film criticism both in the popular press and the academy. The origins of a director-based film criticism still insistently echo today: countless volumes about individual directors are published each year, the Criterion Collection re- leases “Eclipse” box sets of directors’ bodies of work, film festivals and museums highlight individual directors in their retrospectives, and the common use of “to Tarantino” as an in- transitive verb meant to describe one who delivers a narrative through a non-linear plot, all underscore the persistent preoccupation (on the levels of criticism, distribution, exhibi- 3 tion, and spectatorship) with the “individual voice” behind the camera. However, I want to argue that authorship does not end with the director. Instead I posit that, today, authors are identified as loci of instances of repetition—in keeping with the writings of Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Peter Wollen, and Michel Foucault—that in turn inspire spectators to pro- ject (via writing, consumerism, or otherwise) traces of the authorship they have identified. Authorship cannot be self-contained: its “voices” must be repeatedly circulated in order to maintain their political, cultural, and social functions. In presenting that argument, I structure this thesis in a way that seeks to highlight the dialogic nature of the multiplicity of influences that have impacted the development of the cinema and its criticism from the 1940s to the present day. The people who have par- ticipated in the cinema (especially directors, critics, and spectators) have been impacted by and singled out during eras characterized by military conflict, economic crises, political scenarios, and marketing schemes, and in turn have seen the value of their influence change throughout this period, affecting the face of cinema’s global and historical develop- ment. I divide this work into three major parts, each representing a period in film history during which major shifts in the conception of authorship in the cinema have occurred. Furthermore, I focus on the works of two directors, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Ander- son, which I believe are among the best examples of the theoretical negotiations of their respective eras. With Kubrick, I begin by focusing on the idea of film-as-text and the criti- cal, spectatorial work of écriture, and work toward troubling that formulation by emphasiz- ing the affective, experiential qualities that distinguish the film from the scénario. Figura- tively, I cross-cut between other influences, such as issues of nationalist cinemas and tradi- tions of “etiquette” to highlight the ways in which the foundational “auteurist” writings 4 struggled to enunciate exactly what it is about a director that (not-) so clearly highlights his or her identity as an author. I use the privilege of hindsight to reinvestigate these seminal works in film authorship by applying new vocabularies to old ones, and argue that the theories of the 1940s through the 1960s undoubtedly influenced the works of later author- ship theorists and critics—for Astruc, Bazin, Truffaut, and Sarris, too, are authors. Fur- thermore, notions of the experiential quality of spectatorship, which alternate between the realms of the symbolic and the affective, govern my analysis of Kubrick, whom critics lauded as being a “conductor” or “orchestrator” of the senses. In Part Two, I seek to emphasize the dialectical shift in the author criticism of the 1960s by focusing on the rise of Lévi-Straussian structuralism in the academy and by align- ing it with a new generation of (formally or self-) educated film buffs and directors who had grown up in a cinema that was increasingly targeted to the young adult demographic and supplemented by an author-centric body of criticism. This 1960s-1970s generation of di- rectors at least somewhat consciously viewed canonizing film history (through allusion to auteurs of the past and by reworking generic conventions, as Noël Carroll argues) by direc- tor as one of its goals. The “Auteur theorists” of this time sought to fill in the gaps of subjec- tivity exhibited in the writings of their predecessors by embracing a more “scientific” ap- proach of analysis, and perhaps its most important contribution to their field involved re- moving ideas of the author-director’s intentions