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• 1 2019-04-27T19:27:47-07:00 I. The Auteur Theory 23 plain 2019-05-13T08:31:12-07:00 The auteur theory as we now understand it was born mostly in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, from the pens of Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, et al. As Peter Wollen notes, the theory had, and still has, a broad definition, one that varies depending on the critic or theorist (Wollen, 2004). At its most basic level, the auteur theory can be understood as treating the film director as the primary author of their film, the same way one would treat a novelist, poet or playwright. As a critical method, it is a way to analyze a film in the context of the director’s body of work or, in other words, assessing a film’s artistic value based on the stylistic and thematic choices that are the director’s own. In his “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Andrew Sarris broke down the auteur theory into “three concentric circles: the outer circle as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning (Sarris, 2004.)” The first is fairly simple: auteurs must be technically great directors, or, as he puts it, “A great director has to be at least a good director.” Next is the kind of style alluded to by Coe’s Washington Post column, or, in Sarris-terms, “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value.” And the third, inner circle, which is a bit more difficult to discern, as Sarris himself notes, is:

  ...not quite the vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life. … Truffaut has called it the temperature of the director on the set, and that is a close approximation of its professional aspect. Dare I come out and say what I think it to be is an élan of the soul? Lest I seem unduly mystical, let me hasten to add that all I mean by “soul” is that intangible difference between one personality and another, all other things being equal.

  Sarris’s definition of “interior meaning” is a bit like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: one knows it when one sees it. Interior meaning is derived from those small moments that, when accumulated from across a director’s filmography, allow one to see and feel the director at work. In the films of Hitchcock, it could be the way a character moves their eyes, or the indifferent treatment of eggs.
  
  Wollen, writing after Sarris in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, explores a similar concept in his discussion of auteur theory. He writes that the films of auteurs contain a certain structure:

  ...associated with a single director, an individual, not because he has played the role of artist, expressing himself or his own vision in the film, but because it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual involved (Wollen, 2004).

  In this sense, the auteur theory demands that the director, though the primary author of his or her work, must be separated from the end result. Wollen writes that auteurs like Howard Hawks or Hitchcock are “quite separate from … ‘Hawks’ or ‘Hitchcock,’ the structures named after them, and should not be methodologically confused.” One must distinguish between the director’s personhood and how they are understood as an artist or auteur. This becomes especially important in understanding the psychoanalytic dimension of auteur theory. In commenting on Wollen’s observation, Sarah Kozloff notes that scholars undergoing an auteurist reading of a film are “uncovering a constructed identity — ‘the author-function’ — not the person him or herself" (Kozloff, 2014). This, Kozloff notes, means the critic or scholar often pursues a psychoanalytic reading of the director, examining the “instinctive thematic preoccupations behind their body of films.” This kind of reading allows one to understand what Sarris referred to as “interior meaning” — the world created by the director’s own sensibility and style. Once distinctive style becomes a criterion of value, the auteur theory becomes useful because, as Wollen notes, it “does not limit itself to acclaiming the director as the main author of a film. It implies an operation of decipherment; it reveals authors where none had been seen before (Wollen, 2004).” The auteur theory is an essential piece to our understanding of Rebecca as a Hitchcock picture. By watching the film through the lens of the “Hitchcock” structure, one sees how Hitchcock asserts his authorship over those who could also be called the primary author of Rebecca: producer David O. Selznick and novelist Daphne du Maurier.