In Hitchcock’s films how does the villain function, and what is the nature of the villain’s character?
The villain is often one of the most interesting and memorable characters from film. Hitchcock’s villains are no exception, and are among some of the most memorable and terrifying in cinema. In Vertigo Hitchcock plays with perception and understanding of the villain and conversely, what constitutes a hero. Vertigo, the life of Detective John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson as he is drawn into a mystery surrounding his friend’s wife, Madeline. After discovering that he is afflicted by acrophobia during a terrifying brush with death, Scottie, now retired is asked by an old friend, Gavin Elster to follow his wife whom he claims has been possessed by the spirit of her suicidal great-grandmother. After rescuing her from nearly drowning, Scottie becomes infatuated by the woman and pursues her. While trying to figure out her melancholy and suicidal tendencies, they are drawn to a church called the Mission of San Juan Bautista. Here, unable to pursue Madeline as she climbs the bell tower because of his crippling vertigo, Scottie sees her fall to her death and is drawn into a deep depression for a year. When he recovers he sees reflections of Madeline wherever he looks, including a woman who bears a striking resemblance to her, whom he pursues fervently. It is later revealed that she was in fact an accomplice playing the part of Madeline whilst Gavin had murdered the real Madeline and staged the encounter with Scottie to cover his tracks. A now obsessed Scottie makes the woman, Judy, dress like Madeline as his obsession grows. He drags her against her will to the Mission to expose her fraud and to overcome his past, tragically it leads to her demise when they are disturbed at the top of the bell tower and she falls to her death, leaving Scottie cured of his vertigo, yet crippled by the repetition of the tragedy. In Vertigo, Hitchcock deliberately makes the nature of his villains ambiguous, disguised and misleading whilst presenting the culpability of the supposedly innocent and heroic characters in order to redefine the audiences preconceived notions about the nature of villainy.
Hitchcock’s construction and exploration of villainy is one of the most interesting and pivotal aspect to his film making. In Vertigo as in many of his other films, Hitchcock often turns the traditional conception of the villain on its head, prompting the audience reevaluate their notions of villainy and the potential for the corrupting power of evil in the seemingly most safe and banal places. In Vertigo the identity of the villain is as elusive as the mysterious Madeline. The audience learns eventually that the protagonist, Scottie has in fact been manipulated by his old friend, Gavin Elster, in a plot to dispose of his wife. One of the interesting aspects of Elster’s character is the nature of his screen relation to Scottie; the fact that they are old friends immediately lulls the audience into a false sense of security. After being introduced to the very human and vulnerable Scottie, Gavin seems to be a stronger and more respectable citizen; in the scene in Gavin’s office we learn of his undertaking the family business and associate the responsibility that perhaps we doubt in Scottie’s abilities with Gavin. In this way the audience is encouraged to believe in Gavin just as easily as Scottie. The elusive and obscure identity of the true villain is common theme in Hitchcock’s work; as in Psycho the audience is kept hidden from the true identity of the villain although having been introduced to them as seemingly harmless people. The nature of Gavin’s link to Scottie’s past is also a favorite theme of Hitchcock’s; the past having a constant and detrimental effect on the present, much like Scottie’s acrophobia that afflicts him so terribly.
As with Gavin or the range of Hitchcock’s villains, especially Norman Bates, the construction of villainy differs considerably from what might be considered a traditional portrayal; in classical Hollywood the villain is often garishly obvious, such as being a literal monster or being foreign. Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula might typify the traditional conceptions of villainy and evil, being visibly and characteristically evil. Hitchcock revels in playing with these traditional conceptions of evil. In Vertigo as in many of Hitchcock’s films the villain is the familiar and the unassuming face of the ordinary person, in this particular case he is an old friend of the protagonist which offsets the audience’s suspicions further.
Hitchcock playfully constructs a complicated relationship between the hero and the villain in Vertigo. We see in Vertigo that there is a thin line between the ordinary citizen and the potential for evil, that both the hero and the villain are equally ambiguous and interchangeable. Hitchcock hints throughout his oeuvre, that the potential for evil resides in everyone and complete innocence on any part is an impossibility. We see this in many ways in Vertigo, despite the fact that Scottie is supposedly the innocent protagonist the audience observes worrying traits of villainy in his demeanor throughout the film. In the restaurant scene at Ernie’s, the opening tracking shot establishes the scene as a point of view shot from Scottie’s perspective. We see Madeline starkly contrasted in emerald green against a deep red background, in which she is already internally framed by Hitchcock twice. The voyeuristic and sexualized nature of this scene calls into question the innocence and intentions of the character of Scottie. Although we have great sympathy for him as a result of his mild manner and harrowing past, the voyeuristic nature of the long gazing point of view shot implicates him (as well as the audience) as maybe not being as innocent as we first suppose, the fact that the audience shares this point of view shot implicates us as equally as Scottie, further complicating the malleable nature of fault and virtue in the mind of the audience. The point of view shots of Scottie following Madeline across the city only add to a growing suspicion of his kindly nature and imply a neurotic, stalker-esque personality trait in him which develops further as the story becomes more complicated and the distinctions between guilt and innocence disintegrate.
The comparison between the hero and the villain is further complicated and our understanding of the nature of innocence and guilt further manipulated by Hitchcock later in the film when we see the relationship develop between Judy and Scottie. Here the similarities between Scottie and Gavin become alarmingly apparent. We see Scottie manipulating Judy; his obsession with Madeline has grown to a point where he completely dominates the woman, reshaping her in the image that he desires with no consideration for her at all, just as Gavin has used her and trained her to be a surrogate Madeline, so does Scottie. Hitchcock establishes the two men as foils to illustrate the interchangeability of villainy and heroism. We see Scottie progressively becoming more like Gavin, but with traits of his own that we do see in the predominantly absent Gavin; Scottie is obsessive and neurotic, Hitchcock illustrates these most alarmingly tendencies in the tense last scene where Scottie drags the unwilling Judy to the top of the bell tower. The intense nauseating score serves here to bolster the decent into uncontrolled frenzy and paranoia, as Scottie roughly handles Judy and reduces her to a whimpering mass. The sweat, hysteria and spiraling Bernard Herrmann score as well as the famous reverse dolly camera shot that emphasizes the feeling of vertigo and nausea in this scene reflect the opening scene of Scottie clinging for life to the gutter of the building to intensely suspenseful effect. In the opening scene the audience is gripped by fear for Scottie, in the finale it is Judy that the audience’s sympathies lie with as the seemingly inevitable unfolds. She falls to her death as a result of his uncontrollable impulse to recreate and resolve past mistakes, and in doing so reenacts them. Scottie, like Gavin both construct their women for personal satisfaction and literally discard them when they have served their purpose, for Gavin it is financial gain, for Scottie personal and psychological healing.
The audience’s relation to the villain is equally important to Hitchcock’s filmmaking style. From the first scene in Gavin’s office the audience is manipulated by Hitchcock into sympathizing with him. He seems genuinely worried for his wife’s safety and desperate for his friend, Scottie, to help him. Hitchcock places the villain in a supposed position of vulnerability to garner audience sympathy for him, whilst simultaneously misleading suspicions about the villain.
Initially there is a degree of transference of villainy from the absent Gavin to Judy; being that she is an accomplice to his crime and she is the source of Scottie’s mental malaise and gradual decline. However Hitchcock is quick to establish her as a victim to diminish these feelings. In several scenes, she is shown as suffering at the hand of Scottie, forced by him, as by Gavin to alter her appearance. In the clothing store she is on the verge of tears, pleading with the obsessed Scottie to end his pursuit. This is typical of Hitchcock; to align the audience with the villain whilst exhibiting the hero as flawed and far from the innocent swashbuckling stereotype of heroism.
It is not until a substantial portion through the film that through Judy’s flashback that we learn he was a murderer and she in fact is the accomplice. However, as in many of Hitchcock’s films our relation to the villain is never the traditional booing and hissing that might be directed towards a classical villain. Instead, the absentee villain is replaced by a progressively maniacal hero, and it is the accomplice to the murder that the audience sympathizes with; in the final sequence in the bell tower Judy is portrayed as the victim, similarly, in Psycho when Norman frantically tries to cover the traces of his “mother’s” crime. It is with him that the audience’s sympathy is directed, hoping that he will get away with it when he disposes of the body in the swamp. Similarly, the audience is distanced from the initially humble and gentle Scottie as his psychosis progresses, and it is Judy that the audience is persuaded to be concerned for in the end sequence of the film despite her involvement in the crime that had crippled Scottie emotionally in the first place.
It could easily be questioned why Hitchcock decides to create these sorts of relationships in his films. The effect is to have left the audience beguiled, with their perceptions of right and wrong, hero and villain usurped by the complexities of their individual characters and situation that redefine those traditional character boundaries. An effect of this disillusionment is to engender an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, whereby, in Hitchcock’s films the traditional roles no longer hold true, in effect everybody is guilty, and everyone is a suspect. This might well have captured the zeitgeist of 1950’s America, locked in the paranoid fear of communism and turned loose on itself by the implications of McCarthyism. The film suggests, as often Hitchcock does, that there is no such thing as innocence, and that even the respectability of a policeman can be corrupted by obsession. Although as Hitchcock is fond of expressing in his films, it is often those in positions of authority, such as Scottie or the Coroner, that are most likely to be corruptible or negligent. The lasting impression that Hitchcock leaves, is that everyone has the potential to be the villain, and that the villains have the potential to be the victims.
Friday, 13 July 2007
Does the cinema make you dumb?
“Unlearn what you have learned.” The infantilization of the cinema audience: How do the thematic elements of The Empire Strikes Back depict the relationship between adulthood and youth and what are the implications for the cinema audience?
One of the major underlying themes of the original Star Wars trilogy is the exploration of the Skywalker family and especially the redemption of Darth Vader by his son Luke. The Empire Strikes Back is one of the most important of the films in exploring this theme; through the unfolding drama we come to explore the darker side of Luke’s past and juxtapose this relationship with the larger plot of the film and the context of the changing practices in Hollywood cinema. Following the victorious defeat of the Empire in A New Hope, we see the Rebels camped on a remote ice planet desperately hiding from an undeterred and relentless Empire led by the obsessional Darth Vader. After swiftly defeating the Rebels with overpowering force, the Rebels retreat and the heroes of the film are split up. Luke ventures alone to pursue his quest for knowledge and the force, after inspiration from a ghost like Obi Wan Kenobi, the others are hunted by Imperial forces in a dilapidated vessel until they find sanctuary with one of Han Solo’s old friends. This friendship however is a betrayed and they are handed to Darth Vader and the bounty hunter Bobba Fett. Sensing the danger, Luke abandons his training to rescue them and confront Vader in a devastating fight that leaves him crippled and hopeless. Meanwhile Han has been frozen and handed to Bobba Fett by Vader. Luke is left with a devastating revelation, the Rebels are left on the run and Chewbacca and Lando set off to rescue Han. In The Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner explores the nature of the relationship between youth and adulthood by presenting the complicated dynamic of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader’s father/son dilemma. This relationship is thematically central to the plot of the film and allegorically reflects the struggle of maturing youth as well as the changing approaches toward film making practices in the New Hollywood.
The polar juxtapositions of good and evil are a hallmark of the Star Wars saga. The simplistic exploration of these themes is essential to the popularity of the series and is prevalent, although less simplistic in The Empire Strikes Back. This theme is a major aspect of the New Hollywood blockbuster style, taking its cues from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In the film we see the continued struggle of the Rebels against the onslaught of the Empire. This ruthless, driving mechanical force is best presented in the scene of the attack on Hoth, where the monolithic walkers devastate the Rebel compound and in space we see the once seemingly huge star destroyers dwarfed by Darth Vader’s impossibly large flag ship. These two forces represent the theme of good verses evil in a grandiose way whilst the conflict is also acted out between the key characters in the film. In many ways the Rebel Alliance and the Empire are representational of the conflicts that surrounded George Lucas when he was originally constructing the film and its predecessor. Here we can see the rebellious youth and the counterculture of the 1960’s and 1970’s allegorically juxtaposed with the highly armed expansionist American war machine under the Nixon and Johnson presidencies and later (for the context of Return of the Jedi and the VHS release of The Empire Strikes Back) the Reagan Administration. It is the youth that the Rebels and Luke signify, and who the saga is generally targeted at. Significantly Luke is portrayed as innocent and pure, as are his fellow rebels in contrast to the elders of the film who are either evil or misleading, even Obi Wan turns out to have been misinforming Luke, and Yoda initially conceals his identity. This can be seen as representative of the general mistrust of parental authority following Watergate and the Vietnam War, that lead to the youth rebellions the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The film establishes a complex set of character relationships and conflicts as the linear narrative unfolds. Centrally we have the quest by Luke to follow in the footsteps of his supposedly virtuous, powerful and deceased father, who in a startling revelation is revealed to be Darth Vader, the ultimate manifestation of evil in the film. This relationship is further added to by the grandfather figures of Yoda and Obi Wan, on one side, and the Emperor on the other. Obi Wan starts Luke down his path to saving his father by initiating his Jedi training so that he might overcome Vader and redeem his own failing, whereas the Emperor is assertive that “the son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi” for this express purpose. As Peter Biskind affirms in “The Last Crusade”, “The trilogy creates an alliance of son and grandfather against the generation of fathers”, this is a central theme of the film one which leads towards the redemption of the father in the final installment, however there is a deeper implication of this narrative strand; the generational gap in the film reflects the thematic basis of the Star Wars trilogy, with Lucas (as well as Spielberg and others) reinventing the cinema experience by aligning themselves with the older generation of cinematic styles that exhibited clear cut heroes and villains as well as linear and uncomplicated narrative strands. Here Lucas circumnavigates and in many respects undermines the artistic exploration of the Hollywood renaissance to return (redeem) the classic Hollywood structure that had all but disappeared. In Star Wars we see the return of the primacy of narrative and the binary oppositions of good and evil.
These two forces conflict for the direction of Luke’s maturation, conversely Luke, in a sign of growing maturation decides upon his own path, both refusing to finish his Jedi training with Yoda by confronting Vader but also not being seduced by the dark side of the Force and joining the Emperor, despite the lure of ultimate power. It is knowledge that is represented as the potent symbol of maturity; knowledge of the force and of his lineage are the two primary powers that Luke wishes to posses, the comprehension of which will complete his maturation from youth and ignorance to maturity and knowledge. We see this in Return of the Jedi where he has come to terms with his parentage and completed his training, only then he becomes less reckless, more mature and able to confront his destiny. In The Empire Strikes Back, his recklessness is symbolic of his immaturity and is punished repeatedly, for example when he goes off alone on Hoth, fails to follow Yoda’s teachings about the force and most poignantly when he impetuously abandons his training. Ironically it is his father who is the most severe punisher of recklessness and impetuousness, as he repeatedly executes senior Imperial officers for their mistakes and ultimately deconstructs Luke physically and mentally when he is confronted by the overconfident youth.
The scene in the interior of the cloud city where Luke and Vader have their climactic show down is one of the most important scenes of the film. It is the ultimate irony that Luke believes he can complete his maturation process by avenging his father and killing Vader; instead we learn he is in fact Vader’s son. The scene itself acts as a Freudian metaphor for maturity with the two headstrong males battling with phallic objects for domination over each other. Whereas Luke’s maturation should be guaranteed by the resolution of his oedipal crisis he is instead literally and metaphorically castrated by his own father and left impotent and prone in the lightsaber duel added to this is the knowledge that Luke’s Saber is his father’s own, thus he is forcibly denied the act of reconciling his father’s supposed past by slaying his father’s murderer with his own weapon. The theme of following his fathers path is further depicted with Luke’s new prosthetic hand that he clutches in the final scene, here he has physically become like his father, less organic and more machine, this is a set back to his development as he wishes to emerge from his father’s shadow not become a replica of it.
This climactic duel is also the focal point of the film’s classic good verses evil theme; Darth Vader the embodiment of the dark side battles with Luke, the last hope of the benevolent forces of the galaxy. In this scene, as throughout the trilogy, color is used metaphorically to suggest to the audience the binary oppositions of good and bad; reminiscent of the classic cowboy films where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black, here we see Vader decked from head to toe in a consuming mechanical pitch black suit, wielding a menacingly red lightsaber, an obvious visual representation of the bad guy. Luke, his opponent in light colors wields a blue saber, when he enters the utopian, white cloud city he passes from the bright immaturity of youth into the darkness of knowledge in the lower levels of the city and Vader’s trap. He is contrasted against the dark interiors of the lower levels of the city where Vader, his fears and legacy await confrontation and what is ultimately a denied resolution. His path from ignorance to knowledge is marked by this contrast in light and dark, as we see through the trilogy from his white robes in A New Hope to his black apparel in Return of the Jedi that he dons after he has learnt the ways of the force and reconciled the truth of his origins. Just as Luke is contrasted, so is Vader; in a pivotal scene where Han and Leia are captured, we see doors slide open to reveal Vader sharply contrasted with a sheer white background, framed by the table and chandeliers to emphasize his undeniable presence in the room, even among his Imperial lackeys his utter darkness is striking. This sort of visual encoding is indicative of Lucas’ reinvention of the genre movie and simplification of narrative, though the film is aimed at a younger audience; its effect on the older viewers is one of infantilization.
There are of course major implication for making a film in the way Lucas and Spielberg began to do so in the 1970’s. By returning to a mode of linear narratives and binary oppositions there is risk of over simplifying cinema and as a result infantilizing the audience. The blockbuster formula established itself with films such as Star Wars, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark; however this formula became a staple for the film industry that came to depend on these easily constructed, high reward features. The problem with such a shift in filmmaking demographics is that of predictability and genre stagnancy that had worn out the genre films of the 1940’s and 1950’s that Lucas so admired and attempted to resurrect. The blockbuster therefore has a tendency to emphasize is linear nature to the extent that the audience is infantilized and spectacle takes the place of narrative, blockbusters have an over dependency on the mythic formula as described by Joseph Campbell in “Hero With a Thousand Faces” and, as a result, despite their individual genre, tend towards a generic formula that encompasses them all. The final scene of The Empire Strikes Back is evocative of contrasted defeat and hope, the audience has been shown that parents are not to be trusted and youths are to face seemingly insurmountable adversary in the journey for maturation which at least cinematically the blockbuster denies it audience through infantilization as Vader denies Luke the easy path to maturity.
The legacy of Star Wars into the 1980’s and 1990’s is one of blockbuster replication of a Fordian scale, where audiences are distracted from their action sequences by dialogue and character development. The rollercoaster of Star Wars, in effect, has left a theme park of repetition and predictability, unsurprising, and rarely surpassing the original.
One of the major underlying themes of the original Star Wars trilogy is the exploration of the Skywalker family and especially the redemption of Darth Vader by his son Luke. The Empire Strikes Back is one of the most important of the films in exploring this theme; through the unfolding drama we come to explore the darker side of Luke’s past and juxtapose this relationship with the larger plot of the film and the context of the changing practices in Hollywood cinema. Following the victorious defeat of the Empire in A New Hope, we see the Rebels camped on a remote ice planet desperately hiding from an undeterred and relentless Empire led by the obsessional Darth Vader. After swiftly defeating the Rebels with overpowering force, the Rebels retreat and the heroes of the film are split up. Luke ventures alone to pursue his quest for knowledge and the force, after inspiration from a ghost like Obi Wan Kenobi, the others are hunted by Imperial forces in a dilapidated vessel until they find sanctuary with one of Han Solo’s old friends. This friendship however is a betrayed and they are handed to Darth Vader and the bounty hunter Bobba Fett. Sensing the danger, Luke abandons his training to rescue them and confront Vader in a devastating fight that leaves him crippled and hopeless. Meanwhile Han has been frozen and handed to Bobba Fett by Vader. Luke is left with a devastating revelation, the Rebels are left on the run and Chewbacca and Lando set off to rescue Han. In The Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner explores the nature of the relationship between youth and adulthood by presenting the complicated dynamic of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader’s father/son dilemma. This relationship is thematically central to the plot of the film and allegorically reflects the struggle of maturing youth as well as the changing approaches toward film making practices in the New Hollywood.
The polar juxtapositions of good and evil are a hallmark of the Star Wars saga. The simplistic exploration of these themes is essential to the popularity of the series and is prevalent, although less simplistic in The Empire Strikes Back. This theme is a major aspect of the New Hollywood blockbuster style, taking its cues from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In the film we see the continued struggle of the Rebels against the onslaught of the Empire. This ruthless, driving mechanical force is best presented in the scene of the attack on Hoth, where the monolithic walkers devastate the Rebel compound and in space we see the once seemingly huge star destroyers dwarfed by Darth Vader’s impossibly large flag ship. These two forces represent the theme of good verses evil in a grandiose way whilst the conflict is also acted out between the key characters in the film. In many ways the Rebel Alliance and the Empire are representational of the conflicts that surrounded George Lucas when he was originally constructing the film and its predecessor. Here we can see the rebellious youth and the counterculture of the 1960’s and 1970’s allegorically juxtaposed with the highly armed expansionist American war machine under the Nixon and Johnson presidencies and later (for the context of Return of the Jedi and the VHS release of The Empire Strikes Back) the Reagan Administration. It is the youth that the Rebels and Luke signify, and who the saga is generally targeted at. Significantly Luke is portrayed as innocent and pure, as are his fellow rebels in contrast to the elders of the film who are either evil or misleading, even Obi Wan turns out to have been misinforming Luke, and Yoda initially conceals his identity. This can be seen as representative of the general mistrust of parental authority following Watergate and the Vietnam War, that lead to the youth rebellions the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The film establishes a complex set of character relationships and conflicts as the linear narrative unfolds. Centrally we have the quest by Luke to follow in the footsteps of his supposedly virtuous, powerful and deceased father, who in a startling revelation is revealed to be Darth Vader, the ultimate manifestation of evil in the film. This relationship is further added to by the grandfather figures of Yoda and Obi Wan, on one side, and the Emperor on the other. Obi Wan starts Luke down his path to saving his father by initiating his Jedi training so that he might overcome Vader and redeem his own failing, whereas the Emperor is assertive that “the son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi” for this express purpose. As Peter Biskind affirms in “The Last Crusade”, “The trilogy creates an alliance of son and grandfather against the generation of fathers”, this is a central theme of the film one which leads towards the redemption of the father in the final installment, however there is a deeper implication of this narrative strand; the generational gap in the film reflects the thematic basis of the Star Wars trilogy, with Lucas (as well as Spielberg and others) reinventing the cinema experience by aligning themselves with the older generation of cinematic styles that exhibited clear cut heroes and villains as well as linear and uncomplicated narrative strands. Here Lucas circumnavigates and in many respects undermines the artistic exploration of the Hollywood renaissance to return (redeem) the classic Hollywood structure that had all but disappeared. In Star Wars we see the return of the primacy of narrative and the binary oppositions of good and evil.
These two forces conflict for the direction of Luke’s maturation, conversely Luke, in a sign of growing maturation decides upon his own path, both refusing to finish his Jedi training with Yoda by confronting Vader but also not being seduced by the dark side of the Force and joining the Emperor, despite the lure of ultimate power. It is knowledge that is represented as the potent symbol of maturity; knowledge of the force and of his lineage are the two primary powers that Luke wishes to posses, the comprehension of which will complete his maturation from youth and ignorance to maturity and knowledge. We see this in Return of the Jedi where he has come to terms with his parentage and completed his training, only then he becomes less reckless, more mature and able to confront his destiny. In The Empire Strikes Back, his recklessness is symbolic of his immaturity and is punished repeatedly, for example when he goes off alone on Hoth, fails to follow Yoda’s teachings about the force and most poignantly when he impetuously abandons his training. Ironically it is his father who is the most severe punisher of recklessness and impetuousness, as he repeatedly executes senior Imperial officers for their mistakes and ultimately deconstructs Luke physically and mentally when he is confronted by the overconfident youth.
The scene in the interior of the cloud city where Luke and Vader have their climactic show down is one of the most important scenes of the film. It is the ultimate irony that Luke believes he can complete his maturation process by avenging his father and killing Vader; instead we learn he is in fact Vader’s son. The scene itself acts as a Freudian metaphor for maturity with the two headstrong males battling with phallic objects for domination over each other. Whereas Luke’s maturation should be guaranteed by the resolution of his oedipal crisis he is instead literally and metaphorically castrated by his own father and left impotent and prone in the lightsaber duel added to this is the knowledge that Luke’s Saber is his father’s own, thus he is forcibly denied the act of reconciling his father’s supposed past by slaying his father’s murderer with his own weapon. The theme of following his fathers path is further depicted with Luke’s new prosthetic hand that he clutches in the final scene, here he has physically become like his father, less organic and more machine, this is a set back to his development as he wishes to emerge from his father’s shadow not become a replica of it.
This climactic duel is also the focal point of the film’s classic good verses evil theme; Darth Vader the embodiment of the dark side battles with Luke, the last hope of the benevolent forces of the galaxy. In this scene, as throughout the trilogy, color is used metaphorically to suggest to the audience the binary oppositions of good and bad; reminiscent of the classic cowboy films where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black, here we see Vader decked from head to toe in a consuming mechanical pitch black suit, wielding a menacingly red lightsaber, an obvious visual representation of the bad guy. Luke, his opponent in light colors wields a blue saber, when he enters the utopian, white cloud city he passes from the bright immaturity of youth into the darkness of knowledge in the lower levels of the city and Vader’s trap. He is contrasted against the dark interiors of the lower levels of the city where Vader, his fears and legacy await confrontation and what is ultimately a denied resolution. His path from ignorance to knowledge is marked by this contrast in light and dark, as we see through the trilogy from his white robes in A New Hope to his black apparel in Return of the Jedi that he dons after he has learnt the ways of the force and reconciled the truth of his origins. Just as Luke is contrasted, so is Vader; in a pivotal scene where Han and Leia are captured, we see doors slide open to reveal Vader sharply contrasted with a sheer white background, framed by the table and chandeliers to emphasize his undeniable presence in the room, even among his Imperial lackeys his utter darkness is striking. This sort of visual encoding is indicative of Lucas’ reinvention of the genre movie and simplification of narrative, though the film is aimed at a younger audience; its effect on the older viewers is one of infantilization.
There are of course major implication for making a film in the way Lucas and Spielberg began to do so in the 1970’s. By returning to a mode of linear narratives and binary oppositions there is risk of over simplifying cinema and as a result infantilizing the audience. The blockbuster formula established itself with films such as Star Wars, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark; however this formula became a staple for the film industry that came to depend on these easily constructed, high reward features. The problem with such a shift in filmmaking demographics is that of predictability and genre stagnancy that had worn out the genre films of the 1940’s and 1950’s that Lucas so admired and attempted to resurrect. The blockbuster therefore has a tendency to emphasize is linear nature to the extent that the audience is infantilized and spectacle takes the place of narrative, blockbusters have an over dependency on the mythic formula as described by Joseph Campbell in “Hero With a Thousand Faces” and, as a result, despite their individual genre, tend towards a generic formula that encompasses them all. The final scene of The Empire Strikes Back is evocative of contrasted defeat and hope, the audience has been shown that parents are not to be trusted and youths are to face seemingly insurmountable adversary in the journey for maturation which at least cinematically the blockbuster denies it audience through infantilization as Vader denies Luke the easy path to maturity.
The legacy of Star Wars into the 1980’s and 1990’s is one of blockbuster replication of a Fordian scale, where audiences are distracted from their action sequences by dialogue and character development. The rollercoaster of Star Wars, in effect, has left a theme park of repetition and predictability, unsurprising, and rarely surpassing the original.
How Does an Analysis of Audience Reception or Fan Activity Add to our Understanding of Blockbuster Culture?
There has been a considerable critical and analytical work done on the relationship between film and audience response, most of these theories centre around psychoanalytical examination of the interaction between image and viewer, how and why an audience empathises or identifies with the screen image and characters. These concepts are integral to an understanding of the blockbuster culture, how audience reception is influenced by the blockbuster’s proclivity for spectacle and audio-visual engulfment more so than other types of film that do not share the blockbuster’s magnitude. When referring here to the “blockbuster”, a diverse and multifarious terminology that can be defined in several ways such as having a large budget, grand scope, generic formula or emphasis on star, I shall be identifying the blockbuster in terms of “high concept”, that is to say films where “sections...are apt to exceed the requirement of the narrative and take on a quasi autonomous function,”[1] with a reliance on set piece extravagance and concentration on spectacle and action over characterisation and plot. In this essay I focus my analysis on the interaction between moving image and audience psychology, particularly on how modes of audience reception work with and are influenced by the conventions of the modern blockbuster[2], and in particular the relationship between fans and the blockbuster film, using Star Wars (1977) as a case study.
One of the central concepts in audience reception and psychoanalytical film theory is the notion of the film experience. It has been pointed out that the method of spectation in cinemas “makes the viewer more susceptible to the power of the message.”[3] There are several qualities of the cinema experience that amplify this audience reaction: the darkness of the cinema combined with the centrality and enormity of the screen creates a heightened sense of attention on the image as focus of the audience’s concentration. The dark interior of the cinema means that the audience can no longer see themselves which can have the effect of dissolving the audience’s awareness of themselves as separate spectators and absorb them into the world that is presented on screen. The combination of huge image and overbearing sounds creates a “vastly oversized representation of the real”[4] that dominates the audience’s attention. These elements combine with the social practice of cinema going; the deliberate action of going to view a film implies the willingness of the audience to submit to the presentation of the image, a conscious decision to focus ones attention implicitly on the film and submerse oneself with the desire to watch and be entertained. In ascertaining the effect this has on the audience, Jean-Louis Baudry argues that “through the darkness of the theatre, the spectator’s relative passivity and through the hypnotic effect of the flickering light and shadow [the film produces] an artificially regressive state.”[5] It could be argued that the effect of watching a film on the large screen can have this engrossing, hypnotising effect, however this suggests a lack of audience interaction with the film which I do not believe to be entirely true. Stephen Prince counters the psychoanalytic approach of implying submissive, voyeuristic audiences championed by critics such as Baudry by asserting that “psychoanalytic film theory fails to deal with the complex role that perceptual processes play in the viewer’s understanding of the visual media.”[6] This conception of the audience’s ability to infer meaning and visually decode the film in thematic and structural terms is a more preferable interpretation of film reception, and is in many instances necessary to the understanding of viewing practices. If we take the example of a film such as Star Wars, a film often cited as typical blockbuster, the necessity for an engaged audience becomes apparent.
The film does contain several scenes of cinematic excess that break from the narrative and digress into pure spectacle. One such scene towards the climax of the film shows the protagonist, Luke Skywalker making an attack on the Death Star. As he does so the camera switches to a point of view shot of the spaceship descending into an attack run in a trench on the Death Star’s surface. The point of view shot combined with the speed and visual intensity of the action is typical of the blockbuster style of visual excess that is argued draws on the audience’s submission to the overwhelming, non-narrative visuals, providing only the scopophilic pleasure associated with the film’s escapism. However the film as a whole depends thematically on the audience to be able to decode the meta-narrative themes that are imbedded in the narrative and give the film a contextual underlying structure. By this I mean the visual motifs such as the opposition of good and evil as represented by the contrast between Darth Vader’s black costume and Luke Skywalker’s white garments that establish them as polar opposites and identifies their position within the film as linked to the dark or light side of the force. This theme as one example also relies on the audience’s awareness of the intertextuality of the film, which alludes to the classic conventions of the Western genre, where the dialogic of the good guy/ bad guy was similarly represented in the dress code of outlaw and the lawman (not to mention the portrayal of Han Solo as a cowboy- like gunslinger or the famous scene of Luke staring off into the setting suns which is reminiscent of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)).
The film’s opposition between Vader and Skywalker[7] can also be interpreted in contemporary terms as representative of the cultural struggle in American society at the time between youth and adulthood, where as a result of the era’s social upheaval from the fallout of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, a mistrust and opposition to the established order resulted in the explosion of the youth countercultural movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though the merits of Star Wars are not representative of all blockbuster films, they demonstrate how the blockbuster, which is often criticised as “lowest common denominator filmmaking”[8], does not necessarily pacify or reduce the film audience to a state of mindless, objective voyeurism. It is even arguable that the inclusive and intertextual nature of blockbusters such as Star Wars or recent comic book adaptations such as Spiderman (2002), is in part responsible for the huge fan bases that films of this kind often produce.
Fandom, although not exclusive to blockbusters, is often associated with the cultural phenomena generated by the industrial practices intrinsic to the formulas of blockbuster production; often addressed as the prevalence for saturation marketing, block booking of cinemas, youth market targeting and the “production and distribution of a chain of interrelated cultural products”[9] such as toys, soundtrack albums, video games and a whole host of ancillary merchandising which are geared toward maximum profitability for a return on the large investments that calculated blockbuster require. The presence of collectable merchandise such as action figures or trading cards is indicative of the trend of fan activity that orbits such popular blockbusters as Star Wars (and its sequels), The Lord of The Rings (2001) or Spiderman. The product tie-ins are promoted to extend the experience of the film outside the cinema in a process of cyclical marketing whereby the film promotes the merchandise which in turn promotes the film. However there first needs to be a deep enough interest in the film for such a marketing relationship to exist. Returning to theories of audience reception, it is possible to identify how this can occur. Graeme Turner argues that “there is a certainly an intense vicarious involvement offered to the cinema-goer”[10], though rather than a insidious marketing brainwash as implied by some critics of popular culture such as Baudry, this fan interaction and indeed obsession can be explained in terms of audience identification with the screen image.
There is a powerful interplay between the image and the audience imagination especially with a film such as Star Wars which utilises such familiar thematic schemas in its narrative exposition. Christian Metz identifies as the ‘imaginary signifier’[11], “referring to the fact that the reality which the filmed images call up is always absent, ‘present’ only in our imaginations.”[12] The film’s ability to enter the audiences psyche, or rather the audience’s ability to enter psychologically into the films fictional construct creates a powerful attachment to the fictional narrative, one which the audience might wish to extend outside of the cinema where the intensity of the cinematic experience can quickly diminish. With Star Wars, whose plot focuses on the classic formative male experience of the Bildungsroman as elaborated and included in the archetypal heroic journey that Joseph Campbell describes in his work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the identification is predominantly with the male audience. None the less, the association of Star Wars with a dominant cultural mythology imbues it a certain level of cultural significance. Matt Hills suggests that this “discourse provide[s] culturally meaningful and seemingly sanctioned ways for fans to legitimate their fandom.”[13] This of course fuels the market for the extra-theatrical experience and allows the filmmakers to capitalise on the film’s success in the ancillary markets.
A common feature, symptomatic of fanaticism surrounding a particular film is repeat viewings. It is often argued that the hysteria surrounding certain film releases is a direct result of the saturation marketing that Richard Maltby criticises for being part of what he calls the “juvenilization of American cinema.”[14] However this is not necessarily true of all blockbusters, one only needs to look at the colossal marketing campaign for films such as Godzilla (1998) and its subsequent inability to perform as expected at the box office to realise that audiences are capable of mature, rational (and obviously negative) responses to the bombardment of advertising, if the film does not live up to the hype that its distributors create around it. For some blockbusters though, a cult of ardent fans emerges with an overwhelming presence that can turn the films into cultural events. The reaction of audiences to these films it has been argued helps establish the studios practice of formulaic repetition in the hope of rekindling the success of their highest grossing pictures. William Paul goes further to argue that:
“There is a kind of reciprocal influence that exists between film producing companies and their audiences that is determined by the way the companies address their audiences: new exhibition practices which occur in response to changing demographics and market pressures, in turn, help transform audience expectations of the movie going experience.”[15]
In the 1970s and 80s this trend related to the increased target marketing of the youth demographic, focussing on their increasing levels of disposable income, this was extended to include the multi-product merchandising that Star Wars helped to establish as an industry standard with its ties to the Kenner toy company, that produced a vast range of action figures based on the film. The effect this was to have was to link the franchise with a youth audience, who extended the popularity of the film into contemporary culture. It could be suggested therefore that with the blockbuster there exists a symbiotic relationship between the audience’s willingness to indulge in the multi-merchandising enterprises that high concept films lend themselves to and the Fordian industrial practices of blockbuster production that create them.
The continued popularity of the blockbuster formula carries with it continued derision from critics. The source of blame often being the very popularity of the blockbuster has over the rest of the film industry. Peter Bogdanovich lamented that this type of film was “devastating to making artistic, smaller films.”[16] It is often argued that the blockbuster, emerging out of the “New Hollywood” era of the 1970s damned the studios into dependence on the huge box office receipts that the blockbuster could promise. It is argued that this resulted in formulaic and repetitive overdependence on action and spectacle for the purposes of marketing; Screenwriter Dan Gordon stated that “I try and write action sequences that will serve the movie and provide the spring-board for the video-game.”[17] This is the common criticism, that the blockbuster marks the death of artistic integrity for the sake of commercial dependence. Yet despite this criticism, blockbusters still make up the staple of Hollywood production, because of their very nature as multi-marketable products, and continue to push higher the limits of audience attendance on a seemingly yearly basis. With each new release, there is the accompanying criticism that these films lack cinematic merit, however this does not stop some of the films becoming enormous successes whilst many very quickly fail to capture the public imagination, even the incredible successes of the comic book adaptations have their black sheep, however this doesn’t stop the forward motion of blockbusters and their sequel franchises. Clearly the fact that blockbusters are still viable economic investments is suggestive that they are still appealing to a mass audience in what is after all a financially driven industry. Peter Biskind mentions that “all the New Hollywood directors believed that being an auteur meant making personal movies”[18], however the creative control of George Lucas over Star Wars is seldom referred to with the same reverence in critical circles as the auteur directors of the 1970s such as Martin Scorsese or Robert Altman. Yet it was Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who defined what a modern blockbuster was, and survived the creative entropy of the New Hollywood and emerged into the 1980s as the most successful directors in Hollywood, which surely speaks to the credit and to the longevity of the blockbusters appeal to the mass audience.
[1] Murray Smith, Thesis on the Philosophy of Hollywood History, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 13.
[2] Which I define in relation to standardised practices of high concept films following the success of Jaws in 1975.
[3] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 128.
[4] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 128.
[5] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 129.
[6] Stephen Prince, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator, in David Bordwell and Noel Carrol (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) p. 77.
[7] Which in the sequel entered into a vastly more complex Oedipal dilemma.
[8] Julian Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters, (London: Routledge, 2003) p.1.
[9] Richard Maltby, Nobody Knows Everything: Post-classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 26.
[10] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 128.
[11] See Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: the Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan, 1982) for further explanation of audience identification and the scopic drive.
[12] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 129.
[13] Matt Hills, Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory, and the Museum, in Julian Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters, (London: Routledge, 2003) p. 187.
[14] Richard Maltby, Nobody Knows Everything: Post-classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 35.
[15] William Paul, The K-Mart Audience at the Mall Movies, in Gregory A. Walker (ed.) Moviegoing in America, (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002) p. 283.
[16] Peter Biskind, Easy Riders Raging Bulls, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) p. 255.
[17] William Paul, The K-Mart Audience at the Mall Movies, in Gregory A. Walker (ed.) Moviegoing in America, (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002) p. 283.
[18] Peter Biskind, Easy Riders Raging Bulls, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) p. 339.
There has been a considerable critical and analytical work done on the relationship between film and audience response, most of these theories centre around psychoanalytical examination of the interaction between image and viewer, how and why an audience empathises or identifies with the screen image and characters. These concepts are integral to an understanding of the blockbuster culture, how audience reception is influenced by the blockbuster’s proclivity for spectacle and audio-visual engulfment more so than other types of film that do not share the blockbuster’s magnitude. When referring here to the “blockbuster”, a diverse and multifarious terminology that can be defined in several ways such as having a large budget, grand scope, generic formula or emphasis on star, I shall be identifying the blockbuster in terms of “high concept”, that is to say films where “sections...are apt to exceed the requirement of the narrative and take on a quasi autonomous function,”[1] with a reliance on set piece extravagance and concentration on spectacle and action over characterisation and plot. In this essay I focus my analysis on the interaction between moving image and audience psychology, particularly on how modes of audience reception work with and are influenced by the conventions of the modern blockbuster[2], and in particular the relationship between fans and the blockbuster film, using Star Wars (1977) as a case study.
One of the central concepts in audience reception and psychoanalytical film theory is the notion of the film experience. It has been pointed out that the method of spectation in cinemas “makes the viewer more susceptible to the power of the message.”[3] There are several qualities of the cinema experience that amplify this audience reaction: the darkness of the cinema combined with the centrality and enormity of the screen creates a heightened sense of attention on the image as focus of the audience’s concentration. The dark interior of the cinema means that the audience can no longer see themselves which can have the effect of dissolving the audience’s awareness of themselves as separate spectators and absorb them into the world that is presented on screen. The combination of huge image and overbearing sounds creates a “vastly oversized representation of the real”[4] that dominates the audience’s attention. These elements combine with the social practice of cinema going; the deliberate action of going to view a film implies the willingness of the audience to submit to the presentation of the image, a conscious decision to focus ones attention implicitly on the film and submerse oneself with the desire to watch and be entertained. In ascertaining the effect this has on the audience, Jean-Louis Baudry argues that “through the darkness of the theatre, the spectator’s relative passivity and through the hypnotic effect of the flickering light and shadow [the film produces] an artificially regressive state.”[5] It could be argued that the effect of watching a film on the large screen can have this engrossing, hypnotising effect, however this suggests a lack of audience interaction with the film which I do not believe to be entirely true. Stephen Prince counters the psychoanalytic approach of implying submissive, voyeuristic audiences championed by critics such as Baudry by asserting that “psychoanalytic film theory fails to deal with the complex role that perceptual processes play in the viewer’s understanding of the visual media.”[6] This conception of the audience’s ability to infer meaning and visually decode the film in thematic and structural terms is a more preferable interpretation of film reception, and is in many instances necessary to the understanding of viewing practices. If we take the example of a film such as Star Wars, a film often cited as typical blockbuster, the necessity for an engaged audience becomes apparent.
The film does contain several scenes of cinematic excess that break from the narrative and digress into pure spectacle. One such scene towards the climax of the film shows the protagonist, Luke Skywalker making an attack on the Death Star. As he does so the camera switches to a point of view shot of the spaceship descending into an attack run in a trench on the Death Star’s surface. The point of view shot combined with the speed and visual intensity of the action is typical of the blockbuster style of visual excess that is argued draws on the audience’s submission to the overwhelming, non-narrative visuals, providing only the scopophilic pleasure associated with the film’s escapism. However the film as a whole depends thematically on the audience to be able to decode the meta-narrative themes that are imbedded in the narrative and give the film a contextual underlying structure. By this I mean the visual motifs such as the opposition of good and evil as represented by the contrast between Darth Vader’s black costume and Luke Skywalker’s white garments that establish them as polar opposites and identifies their position within the film as linked to the dark or light side of the force. This theme as one example also relies on the audience’s awareness of the intertextuality of the film, which alludes to the classic conventions of the Western genre, where the dialogic of the good guy/ bad guy was similarly represented in the dress code of outlaw and the lawman (not to mention the portrayal of Han Solo as a cowboy- like gunslinger or the famous scene of Luke staring off into the setting suns which is reminiscent of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)).
The film’s opposition between Vader and Skywalker[7] can also be interpreted in contemporary terms as representative of the cultural struggle in American society at the time between youth and adulthood, where as a result of the era’s social upheaval from the fallout of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, a mistrust and opposition to the established order resulted in the explosion of the youth countercultural movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though the merits of Star Wars are not representative of all blockbuster films, they demonstrate how the blockbuster, which is often criticised as “lowest common denominator filmmaking”[8], does not necessarily pacify or reduce the film audience to a state of mindless, objective voyeurism. It is even arguable that the inclusive and intertextual nature of blockbusters such as Star Wars or recent comic book adaptations such as Spiderman (2002), is in part responsible for the huge fan bases that films of this kind often produce.
Fandom, although not exclusive to blockbusters, is often associated with the cultural phenomena generated by the industrial practices intrinsic to the formulas of blockbuster production; often addressed as the prevalence for saturation marketing, block booking of cinemas, youth market targeting and the “production and distribution of a chain of interrelated cultural products”[9] such as toys, soundtrack albums, video games and a whole host of ancillary merchandising which are geared toward maximum profitability for a return on the large investments that calculated blockbuster require. The presence of collectable merchandise such as action figures or trading cards is indicative of the trend of fan activity that orbits such popular blockbusters as Star Wars (and its sequels), The Lord of The Rings (2001) or Spiderman. The product tie-ins are promoted to extend the experience of the film outside the cinema in a process of cyclical marketing whereby the film promotes the merchandise which in turn promotes the film. However there first needs to be a deep enough interest in the film for such a marketing relationship to exist. Returning to theories of audience reception, it is possible to identify how this can occur. Graeme Turner argues that “there is a certainly an intense vicarious involvement offered to the cinema-goer”[10], though rather than a insidious marketing brainwash as implied by some critics of popular culture such as Baudry, this fan interaction and indeed obsession can be explained in terms of audience identification with the screen image.
There is a powerful interplay between the image and the audience imagination especially with a film such as Star Wars which utilises such familiar thematic schemas in its narrative exposition. Christian Metz identifies as the ‘imaginary signifier’[11], “referring to the fact that the reality which the filmed images call up is always absent, ‘present’ only in our imaginations.”[12] The film’s ability to enter the audiences psyche, or rather the audience’s ability to enter psychologically into the films fictional construct creates a powerful attachment to the fictional narrative, one which the audience might wish to extend outside of the cinema where the intensity of the cinematic experience can quickly diminish. With Star Wars, whose plot focuses on the classic formative male experience of the Bildungsroman as elaborated and included in the archetypal heroic journey that Joseph Campbell describes in his work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the identification is predominantly with the male audience. None the less, the association of Star Wars with a dominant cultural mythology imbues it a certain level of cultural significance. Matt Hills suggests that this “discourse provide[s] culturally meaningful and seemingly sanctioned ways for fans to legitimate their fandom.”[13] This of course fuels the market for the extra-theatrical experience and allows the filmmakers to capitalise on the film’s success in the ancillary markets.
A common feature, symptomatic of fanaticism surrounding a particular film is repeat viewings. It is often argued that the hysteria surrounding certain film releases is a direct result of the saturation marketing that Richard Maltby criticises for being part of what he calls the “juvenilization of American cinema.”[14] However this is not necessarily true of all blockbusters, one only needs to look at the colossal marketing campaign for films such as Godzilla (1998) and its subsequent inability to perform as expected at the box office to realise that audiences are capable of mature, rational (and obviously negative) responses to the bombardment of advertising, if the film does not live up to the hype that its distributors create around it. For some blockbusters though, a cult of ardent fans emerges with an overwhelming presence that can turn the films into cultural events. The reaction of audiences to these films it has been argued helps establish the studios practice of formulaic repetition in the hope of rekindling the success of their highest grossing pictures. William Paul goes further to argue that:
“There is a kind of reciprocal influence that exists between film producing companies and their audiences that is determined by the way the companies address their audiences: new exhibition practices which occur in response to changing demographics and market pressures, in turn, help transform audience expectations of the movie going experience.”[15]
In the 1970s and 80s this trend related to the increased target marketing of the youth demographic, focussing on their increasing levels of disposable income, this was extended to include the multi-product merchandising that Star Wars helped to establish as an industry standard with its ties to the Kenner toy company, that produced a vast range of action figures based on the film. The effect this was to have was to link the franchise with a youth audience, who extended the popularity of the film into contemporary culture. It could be suggested therefore that with the blockbuster there exists a symbiotic relationship between the audience’s willingness to indulge in the multi-merchandising enterprises that high concept films lend themselves to and the Fordian industrial practices of blockbuster production that create them.
The continued popularity of the blockbuster formula carries with it continued derision from critics. The source of blame often being the very popularity of the blockbuster has over the rest of the film industry. Peter Bogdanovich lamented that this type of film was “devastating to making artistic, smaller films.”[16] It is often argued that the blockbuster, emerging out of the “New Hollywood” era of the 1970s damned the studios into dependence on the huge box office receipts that the blockbuster could promise. It is argued that this resulted in formulaic and repetitive overdependence on action and spectacle for the purposes of marketing; Screenwriter Dan Gordon stated that “I try and write action sequences that will serve the movie and provide the spring-board for the video-game.”[17] This is the common criticism, that the blockbuster marks the death of artistic integrity for the sake of commercial dependence. Yet despite this criticism, blockbusters still make up the staple of Hollywood production, because of their very nature as multi-marketable products, and continue to push higher the limits of audience attendance on a seemingly yearly basis. With each new release, there is the accompanying criticism that these films lack cinematic merit, however this does not stop some of the films becoming enormous successes whilst many very quickly fail to capture the public imagination, even the incredible successes of the comic book adaptations have their black sheep, however this doesn’t stop the forward motion of blockbusters and their sequel franchises. Clearly the fact that blockbusters are still viable economic investments is suggestive that they are still appealing to a mass audience in what is after all a financially driven industry. Peter Biskind mentions that “all the New Hollywood directors believed that being an auteur meant making personal movies”[18], however the creative control of George Lucas over Star Wars is seldom referred to with the same reverence in critical circles as the auteur directors of the 1970s such as Martin Scorsese or Robert Altman. Yet it was Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who defined what a modern blockbuster was, and survived the creative entropy of the New Hollywood and emerged into the 1980s as the most successful directors in Hollywood, which surely speaks to the credit and to the longevity of the blockbusters appeal to the mass audience.
[1] Murray Smith, Thesis on the Philosophy of Hollywood History, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 13.
[2] Which I define in relation to standardised practices of high concept films following the success of Jaws in 1975.
[3] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 128.
[4] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 128.
[5] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 129.
[6] Stephen Prince, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator, in David Bordwell and Noel Carrol (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) p. 77.
[7] Which in the sequel entered into a vastly more complex Oedipal dilemma.
[8] Julian Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters, (London: Routledge, 2003) p.1.
[9] Richard Maltby, Nobody Knows Everything: Post-classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 26.
[10] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 128.
[11] See Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: the Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan, 1982) for further explanation of audience identification and the scopic drive.
[12] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 129.
[13] Matt Hills, Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory, and the Museum, in Julian Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters, (London: Routledge, 2003) p. 187.
[14] Richard Maltby, Nobody Knows Everything: Post-classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 35.
[15] William Paul, The K-Mart Audience at the Mall Movies, in Gregory A. Walker (ed.) Moviegoing in America, (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002) p. 283.
[16] Peter Biskind, Easy Riders Raging Bulls, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) p. 255.
[17] William Paul, The K-Mart Audience at the Mall Movies, in Gregory A. Walker (ed.) Moviegoing in America, (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002) p. 283.
[18] Peter Biskind, Easy Riders Raging Bulls, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) p. 339.
Where's the beef?
Is the relevance of the notion of authorship enhanced or diminished by a greater understanding of what filmmakers actually do?
One of the essential dilemmas when considering the notion, or even the feasibility of authorship is to consider its changing role in film history. In attempting to analyse the concept of authorship, which if we use Francois Truffaut’s model of the auteur as defined in his 1954 essay in Cahier du cinema, results in the introduction of a creative hierarchy that places filmmaking in the same realm of critical analysis of literature or art, by asserting a hegemonic “vision” in an artistic sense, usually attributed to the director. This concept becomes problematic as it negates the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process not only by supplanting the technical and industrial aspects of production but also by asserting creative control in the hands of the director, dismissing the artistic contributions of the other filmmaking departments such as cinematography, sound design, acting, and writing. The relevance of such a theory becomes more problematic when trying to assert its position in the highly diversified filmmaking industry today, not to mention its coherence in the classical Hollywood system before the vertical disintegration of the old studio system following 1948 Paramount antitrust lawsuit.
If one identifies the basic concepts of auteur theory, as pertaining to mis en scène, through which “many auteuristic critics uncover a stylistic ‘signature’ in the visuals which the attribute to an author/auteur,”[1] what emerges is the assertion of a creative figurehead through which it is believed the artistry of a film emanates. This, asserts that in filmmaking there is a clear “vision” of what the film should look like that is realised by director. If one extrapolates this as discerning a creative control over a film project, then there are certainly instances in which this belief can be accommodated, most often cited are the works of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, or John Ford, whose works are often linked to certain visual styles and genres (suspense thrillers and westerns respectively). In Hitchcock’s films there are re-occurring thematic motifs such as voyeurism which are often twinned cinematically with extended takes and point of view shots such as in the establishing shot of Rear Window (1954). This is certainly indicative of what the Cahier group would identify as an auteuristic style. However there are certain problems in addressing the filmed medium in these sorts of critical terms; Susan Hayward points out that:
“As a result of this misuse of the term, cinema became divided into a canon of the ‘good’ or ‘great’ directors and the rest. The initial impact of this on film courses and film studies in general was considerable, the tendency being to study only the good or great canon.”[2]
This concept of the good/great directors has the effect of overlooking the other aspects of creative input that result in the finished product. If we take Rear Window as an example we can see how the primacy of the director as the creative genius begins to break down. Though Hitchcock directed and produced the film, there are considerable other contributors to the film’s aesthetic. Though Hitchcock is praised for his visual style and long takes, one has to take into consideration that these takes were only possible because of the set design which was completely fabricated on one of the Paramount sound stages, and how the contribution of cinematographer Robert Burks, whose ability to manipulate the set photographically was of immense importance in realising the film’s style, and earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1955.[3] Often overlooked as well is the contribution of the sound department, for having to create a complete naturalistic sound environment for the film as well as creating nuanced musical themes to tie into the plot (notably the progression of the songwriter’s character); Loren L. Ryder was also nominated for this work.[4] These contributions call into question David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s definition of the director being the author of a particular film, that being “the director [as having] most control over how a movie looks and sounds.”[5] If those in charge of different film departments such as cinematography, editing and sound design are recognised independently by the AMPAS[6] for their contributions then it suggests creative centrality is not necessarily a viable conclusion even in films which it is purported to be most evident. This is one of the core debates surrounding the issue of auteurism. The focus on auteurism as identifiable by mis en scène, has as Gianluca Sergi and Alan Lovell criticise, “encouraged a dogmatic belief that cinema is a visual medium. [And] As a consequence, the role of sound has been neglected.”[7] By assuming that the art is in the image, the collective properties of filmmaking are subsumed, which in the modern industry has had huge repercussions; Notably the animosity between the Writers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America, where consternation has arisen over artistic credit for films. Auteur theory has encouraged a belief that the director is the artist and has the driving vision of the film, whereas the screenwriters maintain that the creative input originates from the ideas and scripts from which the film is generated. This is a crucial dispute especially if one takes in to consideration as Sergi and Lovell do that “the majority view amongst filmmakers is that the scripts is the most important part of filmmaking.”[8]Even Andre Bazin, the co-founder of Cahier du cinema, was outspoken about this application of auteur theory. Where the theories place emphasis on the progression and continuity of style as identifying an auteur/author, Bazin argued that “in film the artistic variables are so numerous and so constantly changing from one production to the other that it is difficult to...discover who the auteur of any film really is.”[9] Though Bazin’s main criticisms focus on labelling auteurs, regardless of artistic merit and simply for having recognisable cannon of work, he does point out one of the major flaws of auteur theory, the identification of a single source or creative input.
These flaws in the auteur theory can be related back to its premise as trying to create a new rhetoric for analysing film in terms of other art forms such as literature where the creative input can largely be identified as singular. Hayward identifies that a considerable influence on the theorising came from attempts “to attack the French cinema of the time which they considered sclerotic.”[10] Which as she points out; “because film is being looked at for its formalistic, stylistic and thematic structures, unconscious structure (such as the unspoken dynamics between film-maker and actor, the economic pressures connected with the industry) is precluded”[11] Though the Cahier group were enabling an academic discourse around film which was to become more prevalent in the 1960s and 70s with the teaching of film and cultural studies at universities the theories surrounding the concept of the auteur created a rhetoric around film that diminished the attention on the technical side of filmmaking. Though the art versus technology debate had existed since the early days of filmmaking, the prevalence of the auteur theory, it can be argued, placed an emphasis on artistic hegemony which was in the 1960’s with the emergence of the New Hollywood moved to create a cult of the artist around certain directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich, who in light of economic instability in the industry were allowed unprecedented control over their own films.
By the start or the 1980s however this had changed, Peter Biskind, remarks how the belief in auteurism had succumbed to its own myths about the importance of the director as visionary: “All but the most tenacious and disciplined directors of the ‘70s who had managed to walk the tightrope between art and commerce, fell to their deaths in the ‘80s.”[12] Instead they were replaced in-part by the control of executive heads and producers such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson who operated in a fashion not unlike the Classic Hollywood system of hiring in talent to put forth their vision of what a film should be, Simpson stated that:
“We don’t take a passive role in any shape or form. Some directors who shall remain nameless do regard movies as an extension of their internal emotional landscape, but Jerry and I decide on the movie we want to make. We then hire an all-star team who can implement the vision. I don’t believe in the auteur theory.[13]
If we consider Simpson’s statement in light of the collaborative process in modern filmmaking we can assess whether or not the term auteur is relevant to mainstream filmmaking today. One aspect of film production, often overlooked by critical film theory, is the economic factors that determine much of what is produced in Hollywood at the present. The predominance of the blockbuster phenomenon, that I shall argue began in modern context with the release of Jaws (1975), has engendered the Hollywood film industry with an ever increasing focus on box office revenues and ancillary marketing as a necessity to cover the high costs of production and distribution. Tino Balio argues that modern Hollywood “remains committed to megapics and saturation booking, which have the combined effect of dominating most of the important screens around the world.”[14] In the face of this reliance on large pictures to fuel the industry and the conglomeration of studios with international media corporations such as the merger of Time and Warner in 1989, it is questionable whether or not filmmakers who have to adhere to the ideologies and corporate responsibilities of their larger international affiliates can retain auteur status, especially in the highly competitive environment of blockbuster production where the inherent financial risks of filmmaking are greatly magnified. Balio argues that this kind of globalisation “hastened the concentration of media by emphasising economies of scale,”[15] which it can be argued has diminished the central role of the director to a technical position within production, having been usurped in over-all creative control by the producers. In this environment the emphasis on the collaborative process becomes more apparent. If we take for example Spiderman (2002) to examine the process of collaboration, the placement of a single creative entity becomes problematic. As with many blockbusters, the Spiderman franchise is based on a pre-sold property[16], so it could be argued that creative citation should be given to Steve Ditko and Stan Lee who claim ownership of the Spiderman intellectual property from their work in the comic books. However even before we mention the film there had been an ongoing dispute about the creative inspiration for the character of Spiderman. “Jack Kirby, in a 1982 interview, claimed Lee had minimal involvement in the character's creation, and that it had originated with Kirby and Joe Simon, who in the 1950s had proposed a character called The Silver Spider.”[17] Even between Lee and Ditko there remained dispute as Ditko created the original concept drawing for the Spiderman character whilst Lee was involved in the creating the story line. With the conversion to film more complications arise; whereas Lee was an executive producer, the screenplay, adapted from various comic book storylines was penned by David Koepp, and the iconic costume, redesigned by James Acheson.[18] Amidst this creative frenzy, it is hard to assess the contribution of director Sam Raimi who considering his foundation in the horror genre with the Evil Dead trilogy, does not appear to exemplify the continuity, or the creative control of an auteur director in Truffaut’s definition of the term.
Warren Buckland identifies that there might still be a place in modern Hollywood for a consideration of authorship. Using the example of Steven Spielberg, arguably the most successful commercial director in contemporary Hollywood, Buckland argues that “an auteur in contemporary Hollywood is a director who gains control over all stages of filmmaking: not just film production, but also distribution and exhibition.”[19] With Spielberg’s prominence as a hugely profitable film director and his accessibility to distribution and exhibition through his joint ownership of DreamWorks studios with Jeffery Katzenberg and David Geffen, he could be considered to be a modern auteur as Buckland defines it. However Spielberg is notably the exception to the rule, being almost unique in his influence in Hollywood compared to the vast majority of directors who have nowhere near the creative control he can accrue when making a film. It is also important to remember that even though Spielberg has the ability to assert complete creative control over his projects he does not. He is often involved in a producer/director capacity, bringing in writers and editors on projects not to mention his lifelong affiliation with composer John Williams whose creative input has become synonymous with Spielberg’s films. Spielberg also, due to the financial risks of large budget filmmaking co-finances and co-distributes his films. Saving Private Ryan (1998) for example was co-distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Distribution, Image Entertainment and United International Pictures[20] (among seventeen of the film’s distributors). It is questionable then whether or not in modern Hollywood, authorial control can be assigned to just one person. Though a director such as Steven Spielberg is often the figurehead of a certain production, it is not possible, especially considering the enormous and multifarious processes of filmmaking[21] that one person can be considered an auteur. With the “vision” of a film in the most basic production deliberated between the writer, director, cinematographer and editor, all of which lay claim to the creation of what the film looks like, it seems doubtable that the relevance or even conception of authorship can be ascribed to any particular role in filmmaking. The emphasis, I believe should therefore be on determining how efficient the collaborative process of film production is at creating aesthetic and entertaining films.
[1] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 44.
[2] Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: Key Concepts. (Florence, USA: Routledge, 2000) pp. 19-27.
[3] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[4] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[5] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 114.
[6] Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences
[7] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 10.
[8] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 115.
[9] Donald E. Staples, The Auteur Theory Reexamined, Cinema Journal, Vol. 6. (1966 - 1967), pp. 1-7. Accessed from http://links.jstor.org 12/05/07
[10] Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: Key Concepts. (Florence, USA: Routledge, 2000) pp. 19-27.
[11] Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: Key Concepts. (Florence, USA: Routledge, 2000) pp. 19-27.
[12] Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) p. 408.
[13] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 19.
[14] Tino Balio, The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s, from Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 70.
[15] Ibid
[16] Carrying with it a pre-existent fan base which reduces the risk of commercial failure by already having been proven as a profitable commodity.
[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiderman accessed 12/05/07
[18] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[19] Warren Buckland, The Role of the Auteur in the Age of the Blockbuster, in Julian Stringer (ed.) Movie Blockbusters, (London: Routledge, 2003) p. 84.
[20] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[21] Which now include computer generated graphics which often require a separate directing and creative staff.
One of the essential dilemmas when considering the notion, or even the feasibility of authorship is to consider its changing role in film history. In attempting to analyse the concept of authorship, which if we use Francois Truffaut’s model of the auteur as defined in his 1954 essay in Cahier du cinema, results in the introduction of a creative hierarchy that places filmmaking in the same realm of critical analysis of literature or art, by asserting a hegemonic “vision” in an artistic sense, usually attributed to the director. This concept becomes problematic as it negates the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process not only by supplanting the technical and industrial aspects of production but also by asserting creative control in the hands of the director, dismissing the artistic contributions of the other filmmaking departments such as cinematography, sound design, acting, and writing. The relevance of such a theory becomes more problematic when trying to assert its position in the highly diversified filmmaking industry today, not to mention its coherence in the classical Hollywood system before the vertical disintegration of the old studio system following 1948 Paramount antitrust lawsuit.
If one identifies the basic concepts of auteur theory, as pertaining to mis en scène, through which “many auteuristic critics uncover a stylistic ‘signature’ in the visuals which the attribute to an author/auteur,”[1] what emerges is the assertion of a creative figurehead through which it is believed the artistry of a film emanates. This, asserts that in filmmaking there is a clear “vision” of what the film should look like that is realised by director. If one extrapolates this as discerning a creative control over a film project, then there are certainly instances in which this belief can be accommodated, most often cited are the works of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, or John Ford, whose works are often linked to certain visual styles and genres (suspense thrillers and westerns respectively). In Hitchcock’s films there are re-occurring thematic motifs such as voyeurism which are often twinned cinematically with extended takes and point of view shots such as in the establishing shot of Rear Window (1954). This is certainly indicative of what the Cahier group would identify as an auteuristic style. However there are certain problems in addressing the filmed medium in these sorts of critical terms; Susan Hayward points out that:
“As a result of this misuse of the term, cinema became divided into a canon of the ‘good’ or ‘great’ directors and the rest. The initial impact of this on film courses and film studies in general was considerable, the tendency being to study only the good or great canon.”[2]
This concept of the good/great directors has the effect of overlooking the other aspects of creative input that result in the finished product. If we take Rear Window as an example we can see how the primacy of the director as the creative genius begins to break down. Though Hitchcock directed and produced the film, there are considerable other contributors to the film’s aesthetic. Though Hitchcock is praised for his visual style and long takes, one has to take into consideration that these takes were only possible because of the set design which was completely fabricated on one of the Paramount sound stages, and how the contribution of cinematographer Robert Burks, whose ability to manipulate the set photographically was of immense importance in realising the film’s style, and earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1955.[3] Often overlooked as well is the contribution of the sound department, for having to create a complete naturalistic sound environment for the film as well as creating nuanced musical themes to tie into the plot (notably the progression of the songwriter’s character); Loren L. Ryder was also nominated for this work.[4] These contributions call into question David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s definition of the director being the author of a particular film, that being “the director [as having] most control over how a movie looks and sounds.”[5] If those in charge of different film departments such as cinematography, editing and sound design are recognised independently by the AMPAS[6] for their contributions then it suggests creative centrality is not necessarily a viable conclusion even in films which it is purported to be most evident. This is one of the core debates surrounding the issue of auteurism. The focus on auteurism as identifiable by mis en scène, has as Gianluca Sergi and Alan Lovell criticise, “encouraged a dogmatic belief that cinema is a visual medium. [And] As a consequence, the role of sound has been neglected.”[7] By assuming that the art is in the image, the collective properties of filmmaking are subsumed, which in the modern industry has had huge repercussions; Notably the animosity between the Writers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America, where consternation has arisen over artistic credit for films. Auteur theory has encouraged a belief that the director is the artist and has the driving vision of the film, whereas the screenwriters maintain that the creative input originates from the ideas and scripts from which the film is generated. This is a crucial dispute especially if one takes in to consideration as Sergi and Lovell do that “the majority view amongst filmmakers is that the scripts is the most important part of filmmaking.”[8]Even Andre Bazin, the co-founder of Cahier du cinema, was outspoken about this application of auteur theory. Where the theories place emphasis on the progression and continuity of style as identifying an auteur/author, Bazin argued that “in film the artistic variables are so numerous and so constantly changing from one production to the other that it is difficult to...discover who the auteur of any film really is.”[9] Though Bazin’s main criticisms focus on labelling auteurs, regardless of artistic merit and simply for having recognisable cannon of work, he does point out one of the major flaws of auteur theory, the identification of a single source or creative input.
These flaws in the auteur theory can be related back to its premise as trying to create a new rhetoric for analysing film in terms of other art forms such as literature where the creative input can largely be identified as singular. Hayward identifies that a considerable influence on the theorising came from attempts “to attack the French cinema of the time which they considered sclerotic.”[10] Which as she points out; “because film is being looked at for its formalistic, stylistic and thematic structures, unconscious structure (such as the unspoken dynamics between film-maker and actor, the economic pressures connected with the industry) is precluded”[11] Though the Cahier group were enabling an academic discourse around film which was to become more prevalent in the 1960s and 70s with the teaching of film and cultural studies at universities the theories surrounding the concept of the auteur created a rhetoric around film that diminished the attention on the technical side of filmmaking. Though the art versus technology debate had existed since the early days of filmmaking, the prevalence of the auteur theory, it can be argued, placed an emphasis on artistic hegemony which was in the 1960’s with the emergence of the New Hollywood moved to create a cult of the artist around certain directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich, who in light of economic instability in the industry were allowed unprecedented control over their own films.
By the start or the 1980s however this had changed, Peter Biskind, remarks how the belief in auteurism had succumbed to its own myths about the importance of the director as visionary: “All but the most tenacious and disciplined directors of the ‘70s who had managed to walk the tightrope between art and commerce, fell to their deaths in the ‘80s.”[12] Instead they were replaced in-part by the control of executive heads and producers such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson who operated in a fashion not unlike the Classic Hollywood system of hiring in talent to put forth their vision of what a film should be, Simpson stated that:
“We don’t take a passive role in any shape or form. Some directors who shall remain nameless do regard movies as an extension of their internal emotional landscape, but Jerry and I decide on the movie we want to make. We then hire an all-star team who can implement the vision. I don’t believe in the auteur theory.[13]
If we consider Simpson’s statement in light of the collaborative process in modern filmmaking we can assess whether or not the term auteur is relevant to mainstream filmmaking today. One aspect of film production, often overlooked by critical film theory, is the economic factors that determine much of what is produced in Hollywood at the present. The predominance of the blockbuster phenomenon, that I shall argue began in modern context with the release of Jaws (1975), has engendered the Hollywood film industry with an ever increasing focus on box office revenues and ancillary marketing as a necessity to cover the high costs of production and distribution. Tino Balio argues that modern Hollywood “remains committed to megapics and saturation booking, which have the combined effect of dominating most of the important screens around the world.”[14] In the face of this reliance on large pictures to fuel the industry and the conglomeration of studios with international media corporations such as the merger of Time and Warner in 1989, it is questionable whether or not filmmakers who have to adhere to the ideologies and corporate responsibilities of their larger international affiliates can retain auteur status, especially in the highly competitive environment of blockbuster production where the inherent financial risks of filmmaking are greatly magnified. Balio argues that this kind of globalisation “hastened the concentration of media by emphasising economies of scale,”[15] which it can be argued has diminished the central role of the director to a technical position within production, having been usurped in over-all creative control by the producers. In this environment the emphasis on the collaborative process becomes more apparent. If we take for example Spiderman (2002) to examine the process of collaboration, the placement of a single creative entity becomes problematic. As with many blockbusters, the Spiderman franchise is based on a pre-sold property[16], so it could be argued that creative citation should be given to Steve Ditko and Stan Lee who claim ownership of the Spiderman intellectual property from their work in the comic books. However even before we mention the film there had been an ongoing dispute about the creative inspiration for the character of Spiderman. “Jack Kirby, in a 1982 interview, claimed Lee had minimal involvement in the character's creation, and that it had originated with Kirby and Joe Simon, who in the 1950s had proposed a character called The Silver Spider.”[17] Even between Lee and Ditko there remained dispute as Ditko created the original concept drawing for the Spiderman character whilst Lee was involved in the creating the story line. With the conversion to film more complications arise; whereas Lee was an executive producer, the screenplay, adapted from various comic book storylines was penned by David Koepp, and the iconic costume, redesigned by James Acheson.[18] Amidst this creative frenzy, it is hard to assess the contribution of director Sam Raimi who considering his foundation in the horror genre with the Evil Dead trilogy, does not appear to exemplify the continuity, or the creative control of an auteur director in Truffaut’s definition of the term.
Warren Buckland identifies that there might still be a place in modern Hollywood for a consideration of authorship. Using the example of Steven Spielberg, arguably the most successful commercial director in contemporary Hollywood, Buckland argues that “an auteur in contemporary Hollywood is a director who gains control over all stages of filmmaking: not just film production, but also distribution and exhibition.”[19] With Spielberg’s prominence as a hugely profitable film director and his accessibility to distribution and exhibition through his joint ownership of DreamWorks studios with Jeffery Katzenberg and David Geffen, he could be considered to be a modern auteur as Buckland defines it. However Spielberg is notably the exception to the rule, being almost unique in his influence in Hollywood compared to the vast majority of directors who have nowhere near the creative control he can accrue when making a film. It is also important to remember that even though Spielberg has the ability to assert complete creative control over his projects he does not. He is often involved in a producer/director capacity, bringing in writers and editors on projects not to mention his lifelong affiliation with composer John Williams whose creative input has become synonymous with Spielberg’s films. Spielberg also, due to the financial risks of large budget filmmaking co-finances and co-distributes his films. Saving Private Ryan (1998) for example was co-distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Distribution, Image Entertainment and United International Pictures[20] (among seventeen of the film’s distributors). It is questionable then whether or not in modern Hollywood, authorial control can be assigned to just one person. Though a director such as Steven Spielberg is often the figurehead of a certain production, it is not possible, especially considering the enormous and multifarious processes of filmmaking[21] that one person can be considered an auteur. With the “vision” of a film in the most basic production deliberated between the writer, director, cinematographer and editor, all of which lay claim to the creation of what the film looks like, it seems doubtable that the relevance or even conception of authorship can be ascribed to any particular role in filmmaking. The emphasis, I believe should therefore be on determining how efficient the collaborative process of film production is at creating aesthetic and entertaining films.
[1] Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 44.
[2] Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: Key Concepts. (Florence, USA: Routledge, 2000) pp. 19-27.
[3] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[4] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[5] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 114.
[6] Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences
[7] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 10.
[8] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 115.
[9] Donald E. Staples, The Auteur Theory Reexamined, Cinema Journal, Vol. 6. (1966 - 1967), pp. 1-7. Accessed from http://links.jstor.org 12/05/07
[10] Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: Key Concepts. (Florence, USA: Routledge, 2000) pp. 19-27.
[11] Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: Key Concepts. (Florence, USA: Routledge, 2000) pp. 19-27.
[12] Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) p. 408.
[13] Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi, Making Films in Contemporary Hollywood, (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) p. 19.
[14] Tino Balio, The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s, from Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 70.
[15] Ibid
[16] Carrying with it a pre-existent fan base which reduces the risk of commercial failure by already having been proven as a profitable commodity.
[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiderman accessed 12/05/07
[18] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[19] Warren Buckland, The Role of the Auteur in the Age of the Blockbuster, in Julian Stringer (ed.) Movie Blockbusters, (London: Routledge, 2003) p. 84.
[20] www.imdb.com, accessed 12/05/07
[21] Which now include computer generated graphics which often require a separate directing and creative staff.
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