A STUDY of JANE CAMPION FILMS Patricie Janstova Ba
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Empirical testing 1 EMPIRICAL TESTING OF AUTEUR THEORY VIA CONTENT ANALYSIS: A STUDY OF JANE CAMPION FILMS Patricie Janstova Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Communication Cleveland State University May, 2003 Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree MASTERS OF APPLIED COMMUNICATION THEORY AND METHODOLOGY at the CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY December, 2006 Empirical testing 2 CHAPTER I LITERATURE REVIEW The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them. It may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation . and it will be enjoyable because it will be true, and new. The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love. — François Truffaut (Le Cain, 2001, p. 1). Introduction Film is a fascinating phenomenon. It is not a creation of a single person, rather a creation of a team. However, since the infancy of movies, individuals have been claiming authorship of a product. It started as early as the beginning of the 20th century, when German writers claimed authorship to the films created based on their scripts. Who can claim authorship? Is there such a thing as individual author in film production? Diving into the literature dealing with and answering such questions, however, leaves one unsatisfied with further questions. Yes, there is such a thing as authorship and it is usually the director who stamps each of his or her films with a unique imprint or signature. But, how do you recognize the director’s signature? Can you rely on the subjectivity of film critics? Are you satisfied when a film critic tells you who is and who is not considered an auteur (the author)? Empirical testing 3 To answer these questions, I am attempting to content analyze a body of work of one director, Jane Campion, through the auteur theory lens. She has been granted auteur status by many critics and scholars (Blonski, Creed, & Frieberg, 1987; Delaney, Dupin, Gee, Gordon, Harrow, Khan, et al. 2002; Mellencamp, 1996; Nelmes, 1999; Polan, 2001; Schröder, 2004). Jane Campion, Polan (2001) states, is one of the few female directors who can be considered an auteur. “. it is the disturbances in her work – the divergences; the dispersions; the tensions, for instance, between quirky humour, a making strange of the familiar, and an interest in the ambiguous, even that which is uncomfortable and which makes the viewer uncomfortable – that means that to study her is to study the cinema differently, to rethink the very terms of analysis of the film director” (2001, p. 167). An elaborate coding scheme was created to objectively test work of Jane Campion and compare it to other non-Campion films, work of other directors. Will she be recognized as an auteur without the subjective eyes of film critics? This is the core question of this study. Auteur Theory The Beginning of Auteur Theory Today, the vast majority of people would agree that film is an art form. How we Empirical testing 4 think about films, however, is not how it was thought of five decades ago. The auteur theory changed how film was viewed in terms of authorship, and because of that, it is one of the most known and most criticized theories in film history. As mentioned earlier, as early as in the 1920s, the question of authorship arose. In the 1940s it became a popular debate among the French film critics with Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc’s beliefs that director should be considered the true author of a film (Bazin, 1967; Bazin, 1971; Thompson & Bordwell, 2003). As quoted in Thompson and Bordwell (2003), Alexandre Astruc wrote in his essay The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo: “The filmmaker-author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen” (p. 415). The Fifties and Romantic – Auteurism The most influential work on film authorship came out of the early fifties, particularly the newly founded French journal Cahiers du Cinema. The writers for the Cahiers formed a polemic – la politique des auteurs, or the policy of looking at films in terms of authors, as Astruc suggested in his essay. The next step in the development of auteurism was A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema, written by one of Cahiers’ own members Francois Truffaut. In his article, he attacked the current French industry, which he called “The Tradition of Quality,” for making “essentially scenarists’ films” (1976, p. 225). Truffaut wrote that the French directors of that time only added visual pictures to the script, with no attempt to add their own creativity, their own talent. He also criticized the scriptwriters for not staying true to the novels they adopted, because they thought it had un-filmable scenes. Of course, he believed there was no such thing as Empirical testing 5 an un-filmable scene. He then continued to critique the scriptwriters of having no originality: There are scarcely more than seven or eight scenarists working regularly for the French cinema. Each one of these scenarists has but one story to tell, and since each only aspires to the success of the “two greats” [scenarists], it is not exaggerating to say that the hundred-odd French films made each year tell the same story . (Truffaut, 1976, p. 232). He also attacked the scriptwriters with a question: What’s keeping [the filmmakers and scriptwriters] from making, from one day to the next, intellectual films, from adapting masterpieces (there are still a few left) and, of course, adding funerals, here, there and everywhere? Well, on that day we will be in the “Tradition of Quality” up to the neck and French cinema, with rivalry among “psychological realism”, “violence”, “strictness”, “ambiguity”, will no longer be anything but one vast funeral that will be able to leave the studio in Billancourt and enter the cemetery directly – it seems to have been placed the next door expressly, in order to get more quickly from the producer to the grave- digger” (Truffaut, 1976, p. 235). The Cahiers editorial critics followed Truffaut’s critique of the current French filmmakers and argued against the directors’ literary films. The magazine argued that even though film production was an industrial creation, it shouldn’t have stopped the director from introducing his own creativity and adding his personality into the final product. They praised individuality, visual distinction, and consistent thematic focus (Buscombe, 1981; Caughie, 1981; Cook, 1986; Miller & Stam, 2000; Sarris, 1962; Sarris, 1968; Sarris, 2003; Stam, 2000; Stam & Miller, 2000; Thompson & Bordwell, 2003; Truffaut, 1976; Wexman, 2003). They argued that even though filmmakers in the United States are working under strict rules of the studios, individual styles and personalities were evident in films by directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks. They argued those directors are true authors of the film, they are the auteurs (Cook, 1986; Truffaut, 1976). Empirical testing 6 The Romantic auteurism of la politique des auteurs was introduced to the United States by film critic Andrew Sarris in his 1962 work (Croft, 1982; Dick, 2005; Sarris, 1968; Sarris, 1962; Thompson & Bordwell, 2003; Wexman, 2003; Wollen, 1969). Sarris is responsible for the loose translation of the French term la politique des auteurs as auteur theory. In his article, he said that authorship is “primarily a critical device for recording the history of American cinema, the only cinema in the world worth exploring in depth beneath the frosting of a few great directors at the top” (Sarris, 1962, p. 6). With the translations of the la politique des auteurs he attached his own ideas. Sarris took Truffaut’s criticism of the French cinema and admiration of certain American directors a step further. He called the American cinema superior to any other cinema, and believed it was the only one worth studying due to the fact that even though working under strict rules of the Hollywood studios, a director’s style can still be acknowledged (Sarris, 1962; Sarris, 1976). Sarris, however, failed to support his statements with evidence. No comparisons to other cinemas ware made, or even attempted. Truffaut, Sarris, and the auteur theorists believed that over time, if there is a recognizable stylistic and thematic personality in a works of a certain director, he or she is to be considered an auteur (Hayward, 1998; Sarris, 1968; Sarris, 1976; Stam, 2000). Directors’ thematic personalities come alive through recurring themes - the “dominant idea[s] made concrete through its representation by the characters, action, and imagery of the film” (Rabiger, 1997, p. 517). Sarris believed auteur theory had three principles. First, “the technical competence of a director as a criterion of a value” (1962, p. 7); second, the identifiable personality of a director through his body of work; third, the inner meaning, “the ultimate Empirical testing 7 glory of the cinema as an art… the tension between a director’s personality and his material” (p. 7). It can be thought of as the director’s vision of the world, and his attitude toward life. Dick (2005) summed Sarris’ three principles of auteurism as technical competence of the auteur; auteur's personality that brings in recurring themes, which become his or her signature; and the tension between the auteur and his material, which may not seem obvious but after analyzing the auteurs work it will come to the surface.