Vivian on the Star as Auteur

Bill Murray: Star as Auteur
By James Vivian

Everyone loves Bill Murray.
Clearly screenwriter/director Sofia Coppola also loves Bill Murray.
            -Scott Weinberg of eFilmCritic [1]

I wrote the movie with him in mind--in that part--so a lot of when I was writing, I was saying, "What would Bill Murray do?-- I was picturing him-- so that kind of informed it.
            -Sofia Coppola, interviewed by Greg Allen

Adorned with numerous awards and nominations, dappled with glowing reviews, and widely regarded as one of the best films of 2003, Sofia Coppola’s sophomore effort Lost in Translation establishes her as a highly talented director. Yet as often as reviews applaud her as a director—placing her on a similar, if not equal level as her father Francis Ford Coppola—they extol Bill Murray’s performance as the best of his careers as much if not more so.

As virtually every review available refers to the film as Coppola’s directorial creation, it seems natural to examine the film as it is understood by the general public: the film attributed to and signed by its author, or auteur as it is termed in film criticism.  However, in the context of auteur theory the prominence of Murray’s influence in Coppola’s work is problematic.  Not only does he dominate the discussion of the film in popular print and internet reviews, but he influences the very conception and writing of the film itself. 

Coppola mentions in one interview: “I said ‘I'm not going to make the movie if Bill doesn't do it…’ I wrote the movie with him in mind, so a lot of when I when I was writing, I was saying, ‘What would Bill Murray do?’ ” [2]. Under the traditional tenets of auteur theory and auteur-structuralism such a strong non-directorial influence on a film is quite problematic—not only in terms of Coppola’s status as an auteur but to the overall stability of the auteur in theory and by extension the history and practice of auteur criticism in film studies.

In the light of this problematization, there are a number of issues to address:  Is the location of creativity and meaning in the director actually changed by Murray?  What are the implications of such a relationship among Murray, Coppola, and the filmic text of Lost in Translation for auteur theory? Does this relationship reveal a fatal flaw in the conception of the auteur?  Is the auteur even a valid concept? Are there other possible unacknowledged conceptions of auteurship? 

These issues do not exist in a vacuum, but rather arise in the context of the historical development of auteur theory.  As such, the historical elements of auteur theory briefly need to be addressed: traditional auteur theory, arguments against auteur theory, the implications of post-structuralism, auteur-structuralism, and the impact of contemporary theory on the auteur paradigm.

Traditional Auteur Theory: la politique des auteurs

Auteur theory is rooted in the personal cinema of Alexendre Astruc’s seminal article “La Camera-Stylo,” published by the socialist film journal L’Ecran français in 1948 (Naremore, 10).  It called for a new cinema based on the metaphorical model of camera as pen, screen as paper, and director as author.  Having validated the role of the film director as artist, this article provided the foundation for François Truffaut’s landmark article “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Français” in the 100th issue of Cahiers du cinéma in 1954.  Resisting the Cinéma du Papa and the tradition of “Quality Cinema” in post-war France, Truffaut denounced the good production values of the lavish literary adaptations in France’s commercial cinema as too distant from his personal view and that of his contemporaries. 

Calling themselves auteurist filmmakers, Godard, Truffaut, and their contemporaries stood at the heart the French New Wave.  They advocated a more individual, democratic, and realistic cinema—one in which an auteur’s film would show evidence of their directorial fingerprint, the unique mark of their individual artistic view.  In Cahiers, they published top ten lists of films listing popular cinema titles alongside high-art films to destabilize the distinction between mass media and the avant-garde. This period of la politique des auteurs effected (1) the Romantic ideal of the director as the individual artist/auteur, (2) a blurring of the dividing line between high-art and popular cinema, (3) the valorization of previously uncelebrated Hollywood genre films, and (4) the hierarchical tendencies to rank directors as good or bad.

Once the articles of Cahiers were translated into English Andrew Sarris synthesized the critical methods of traditional auteurist theory.  Sarris theory formulated the auteur as an idealized director qualified by three increasingly exclusive requirements: (1) “technical competence” (Sarris, 562), (2) a “distinguishable personality” with “certain characteristics of style”, and (3) “unique interior meaning,” perspective, or worldview—ultimately an “ambiguous” one. 

At the lowest level, the technician (563) possesses technical competence yet lack a stylistic consistency and unique personality—they are able to make produce filmic images, but little else of value.  One step higher is the stylist or metteur en scène who maintains both technical competence and a consistent style, but never reaches the unique interior meaning of the auteur.  Sarris offers the helpful model of concentric circles to distinguish one category from the other, and places the auteur in the small circle at the center.  Ultimately, “after a given number of films, a pattern is established” and the “genuine director”—the auteur—is identified.

Yet the hierarchical model essential to Sarris’ freshly formulated critical technique auteur theory has been problematized on two major fronts. 

First, Pauline Kael undermines all three elements of auteur theory’s “rigid formula” (Kael, 519) in the article “Circles and Squares.”  Attacking the rigidity of Sarris’ hierarchical model, she emphasizes that “criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in a new work.”

Addressing Sarris’ outer circle of technical ability, Kael views the standards of technical conventions as a limiting construct, asserting: “it may be a hindrance, leading [new directors] to banal slickness, instead of discovery of their own methods” (520).  For the middle circle she reverses auteur theory’s valuation of the presence of an artist’s personality in a work.  Kael notes: “Often the works in which we are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst films—when he falls back on the devices he has already done to death” (521).  Instead she assigns value to novelty and innovation: “when a famous director makes a good movie, we look at the movie, we don’t think about the director’s personality.”  While part of Kael’s last critical move in relation to the auteurist inner circle of interior meaning is laden with notions of high art and popular art that have since been outmoded by post-modernist theory, her argument is saved by the inability of Sarris’ model to adequately address the writer-director.  Composing a script in line with their own personality, the writer-director’s work lacks the “tension between his personality and his material” (526) and is unaccounted for in Sarris’ rubric.  Yet as bitter and cutting as Kael’s critique is, it only addresses the formal features of Sarris’ formula, leaving the individuated artist/auteur intact—albeit a bit scuffed in the fray.

If Kael’s criticism of Sarris was a street scuffle with traditional auteur theory, post-structuralism’s second attack on the auteur is all out nuclear war.  Beginning in 1968 and continuing through the seventies, the post-structural critics madly hammer their big red buttons at various structures of literature, language, art, and culture.  One of the first and largest payloads was dropped square on the author’s head. 

Though Roland Barthes’ article “The Death of the Author” addresses the literary author, it is readily applied to an auteur theory rooted in Astruc’s camera-stylo metaphor.  Barthes identifies the writing as a “neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away” (Barthes, 142). Erasure of individual subjectivity removes the very foundation of the traditional auteur.

While he supports the denaturalization of the writing process through surrealist writing practices and the retrojection of Proust’s literary Charlus onto the historical Montesquiou, linguistics provides his most convincing example of the destruction of authorship.  “Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject,’ not a ‘person,’ and this subject [is] empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it” (145).  Barthes identifies the linguistic “I” and the literary author as one in the same.  Just as much as “I” is constructed by the subjectivity that speaks it, so is the author constructed by and within the text.  The author is not a source of unique creativity with “passions, humors, feelings, impressions,” but rather a scriptor with an “immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt” (147).  Writing then is reconfigured from determinative to multiplicative, “everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered, the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and every level, but there is nothing beneath.”  With meaning no longer located in the author, determinacy evaporates.  What then is writing if there is no meaning?

It is not that there is no meaning altogether.  Instead, the previously determinate meaning located within a single text is revealed as something radically different: “a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader ” (Barthes, 148).  Yet while Barthes asserts the prominence of the reader over the author, the reader’s subjectivity “can no longer be personal”—the reader is simply a point where myriad cultural influences converge in a particular and potentially unique way.

What then of auteur theory?  What ever happened to Bill Murray’s influence on Lost in Translation?

Auteur-Structuralism: Raising the Dead

The discussion of the auteur does not stop in the wake of the post-structural apocalypse.  Even after Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author/auteur, some conception of it lingers on.  In fact, it must.  Even though the author/auteur may be declared dead, the idea of the authorship still exists in order to discuss its demise.  On a practical level, it persists because it is still an important and useful tool in film criticism.

Though post-structuralism may have refuted the cult of the auteur in traditional auteur theory, auteur-structuralism grows from its ashes.  Instead of relying on the auteur as a creative individual, auteur-structuralism functions by “isolating the auteur’s signal within the noise of the text” and examining the inherent structures within the group of works signed by the same auteur (Andrews, 79). The fruit of the structured binary oppositions Peter Wollen develops in his discussion of Howard Hawks and John Ford films are proof that some notion of the auteur is still relevant. 

As Dudley Andrews points out, even before the post-structuralism’s auteurial de-location, André Bazin acknowledges the auteur as a “function within a system of forces” (Andrew, 78).  In opposition to his friends at Cahiers, Bazin seems to have been on the right track all along: “to stop one’s analysis at the auteur … was to stop inquiring of the cinema. […] The author may have been primary for him, but only as a tortion in the knot of technology, film language, genre, cultural precedent … a knot that has … grown increasingly tangle.”  Yet Bazin died before the rest of the film criticism caught up to him.  In fact, as Truffaut’s first full-length feature 400 Blows was begun at his death in 1959, it might be possible that the faults in traditional auteur theory existed because Bazin wasn’t around to point them out and patch them up.

Though auteur-structuralism may be useful in teasing out the overarching structures of a large group of films attributed to one director, its scope is limited to groups of films that are connected by the same auteur construct.

A Final Note on the Death of the Author

At this point, it is important to note that Barthes’ notion of the death of the author is death only in the fetishism of the individual director as the locus of pure creativity.  The author still exists as within the “tissue of signs” of the text.  The author is still valid and worthwhile in its function as nodal point for the interaction of cultural influences.

Yet with the auteur supposedly dead, or at least relegated to the realm of abstract constructs, why is it Sofia Coppola such a widely discussed figure?  Her last name provides a clue.

Resuscitation of the Auteur in the Context of Corporate Hollywood Marketing

Turning to Timothy Corrigan’s article on the auteur in post-classical cinema, “Auteurs and the New Hollywood,” the auteur is re-conceptualized as a marker, sign, or brand-name to identify films in the era of the waning American studio system during the late 60s and early 70s.  Yet the notion of an auteur’s significance was by no means radical.  “From its inception, auteurism has been bound up with changes in industrial desires, technological opportunities, and marketing strategies” (Corrigan, 40).  In fact, during the early part of this era, “the French New Wave fused elements of Italian neorealism with a fond, insouciant, distinctively Gallic attitude toward old-fashioned Hollywood genres and directors.  In certain American contexts, its name became useful as a kind of marketing strategy” (Naremore, 11).  Even as Naremore tries to recoup what has just slipped onto the page in the following paragraph, the clue has already been dropped.  To alter a metaphor from Gilles Deleuze (Andrew, 83), the auteur’s name has always been a type of kanji, a fictive graphic sign to connote meaning to potential filmgoers.

The fact that this express relationship has remained hidden for so long is no surprise.  As Pauline Kael’s emphatic, indignant, and even angry assertion that “criticism is an art” symptomatically reveals, the entire community of critics and filmmakers want to place cinema as an art form alongside painting, sculpture, and the other modes of ‘high art’.  As opposed to examining the material concerns and repercussions of cinema with a critical eye, there is a deeply entrenched tendency to avert the critical gaze from the gritty and often dire monetary and creative costs of producing the fantastic dream-like productions that illuminate movie screens, televisions, and computers around the world.  While discussion the money a film grosses at the box office, from rentals, and merchandising does take place in some venues, film theory preoccupies itself with film as art rather than a financial entity and money-making institution.  Yet it is at the difficulties and sacrifices to the studios and filmgoing audience as a market that Corrigan begins his discussion of Sofia Coppola’s father, Francis Ford Coppola.

Under the heading of “Economics of Self-Sacrifice,” Corrigan offers a particular view on the American auteur as one mired in the midst of financial, artistic, temporal, and realistic restrictions.  Again Bazin resurfaces through his conception of the auteur existing in “tortion in the knot of technology, film language, genre, cultural precedent.”  Corrigan posits that F.F. Coppola exemplifies precisely such a torsion and intersection of the conflict of imaginative desire and demands of reality; he is the “Romantic entrepreneur” (Corrigan, 52).  One moment he’s the “self-exiled stridently independent auteur” while in the next he “humbly surrenders [Tucker] to George Lucas’s ‘marketing sense of what the people want’” (52-3).  His “ambivalent double image as the auteur-star of gigantic productions and the auteur-creator victimized by the forces of those productions defines Coppola’s central place within the commerce of auteurism” (53-4). Corrigan’s bifurcation of the modern auteur into the auteur-star and the creative auteur-creator emphasizes the multi-faceted role of the modern auteur.  The auteur’s marketability is two-fold: they are both marketable for the studio system as a source of financial capital as well as marketable to the studio to achieve their own creative ends.  In other words, the auteur serves as a brand name to promote the studios’ films while simultaneously exerting their clout as a marketable entity to satisfy their own personal creative desires.  In the era of Hollywood blockbusters and the mini-major studios, the auteur is redefined in polyvalence—they need to serve multiple purposes to multiple groups and people.

It is neither the studio nor the auteur that provides the financial incentive to drive this relationship.  It is the cinematic audience that provides the motivation for this entire system.  To retrace Barthes’ footsteps, the bifurcation and dilution of the auteur’s individual agency mimics the subordination of the author to the reader.  In terms of cinema, “auteurs may exist but they do so only by the grace of the spectators” (Andrew, 80).  Now more than ever, the aggregate spectator—the collective desires of cultural spectatorship—drives the production of films.  In an era where off-screen space is eliminated, it is the audience that validates the ideology of a particular film or genre.  The spectator decides whether or not to rent a movie, buy a film’s merchandise, or participate in the product tie-ins.  If the aggregate spectator makes the decision that it likes Sofia Coppola films, there is immense incentive for the studios to provide that particular auteur-star to the audience.

Yet this entire discussion has focused around the auteur, traditionally held to be the director.  Is it a fair assumption to hold that spectators go to see movies to see what their favorite director is going to do next?  Perhaps if a director is truly a star they do, but the most obvious answer is that they go to see their favorite star actor.  While it is true that the director has the strongest influence over the portrayal of a star actor in a film, the way star actors portray themselves has the potential to be just as influential in the overall outcome of a film.  Naremore admits this possibility at the beginning of his article on auteurship: “Given the circumstances under which particular films are made, it is possible to think of any of the creative individuals who contribute to them as a kind of author” (Naremore, 9).  He then claims “film authorship is associate with directors, who are said to play the most important role in the production process.”  Said by whom?  Film critics?  While they are arguably one of the most cinematically informed groups, such a declaration is also somewhat problematic.  Critics are the group most heavily invested in the open-ended interpretation of directorial intent, agency, and creativity—with the exception of directors themselves.  If one were prone to psychoanalysis, the privileging of directors by critics as a repressed desire to direct meaning in cinema might be an interesting topic.  But as a media student, I’m most interested in the artistry of the cinematic medium; hence I will conclude my discussion of auteurship with addressing the issue of Bill Murray’s auteur status in Lost in Translation.

As it stands at the end of this examination of the history of auteurship in cinema, I feel I can reasonably conclude that Bill Murray’s influence on Lost in Translation does occur on the level of the auteur—yet not at the expense of Coppola’s status as auteur.  The collaborative aspect of cinema naturally lends it self to multiple influences on the resulting cinematic text. 

Not only does Murray’s status as a movie star help generate the source material for the text of the movie, but his talent and persona as an actor opened up space in the moviemaking process for him to take control of the narrative.  Sofia Coppola details one such scene: “The way we did that scene, Naka is a real photographer, and we'd just whisper people's names into his ear--like Roger Moore and Sean Connery--and he would say it, and Bill would react, so Bill'd never know what we were going to throw at him. It was really fun to watch him react and work like that, though” [3].  In another scene with Murray and Johansson’s characters talking in the hotel lounge, Coppola’s script simply instructed Murray’s character to make his co-star laugh without so much as a prompt or cue.  Furthermore his late night tribulations with the exercise machine was entirely of his own invention.  Murray’s backlog of Hollywood blockbusters and as well as lead roles in over thirty major productions has earned him the creative capital to spend as acting as a star-auteur.  The self-reflexivity of his recent foray into smaller art films like Lost in Translation and Coffee and Cigarettes show how his cult of personality has permeated the very fabric of cinema.  If this isn’t the fingerprint of auteurship as Truffaut envisioned it, I’m not sure what else it could be.

I mean, he’s Bill Murray, everyone loves Bill Murray!

Notes:

1. http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8132&reviewer=128
2. http://greg.org/archive/2003/08/31/interviewing_sofia_coppola_about_lost_in_translation.html
3. http://greg.org/archive/2003/08/31/interviewing_sofia_coppola_about_lost_in_translation.html

Comments

[Morgan Weiland]

Vivian's assessment of the problems, limitations, and possibilities of auteurism bring to light many elements of this on-going debate. His analysis of Lost in Translation is timely as Sofia Coppola is emerging as a new and exciting director, and Bill Murray is finding a strong second wind in films by younger directors, including Wes Anderson. However, Vivian’s assessment of Coppola could be deepened by further investigating her role as auteur.

Investigating Sofia Coppola as auteur is difficult as she has only put out two feature films (The Virgin Suicides, 1999, Lost in Translation, 2003), with her third in post-production (Marie-Antoinette). From these two films, however, there is an argument for a direction that she seems to be taking as auteur – a direction that is informed by a synthesis of Laura Mulvey’s argument about the male gaze in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) and the theory of auteurism that Vivian outlined. Essentially, Coppola is intriguing as auteur as she fixes her films with a specific female point of view, foregrounding many of the problems that the male gaze renders on women in film.

In both films, Coppola focuses on young women, emphasizing their relationship with the male gaze. In The Virgin Suicides, Coppola investigates the lives of a group of sisters, oppressed and consequently sexually repressed by their overbearing parents. These sisters ultimately take their lives at the end of the film, exercising the only means of control that they have over their existences as well as their bodies, which are central throughout the film. This could be read as Coppola’s investigation of the negative effects that the male gaze has on women, particularly in cinema, rendering them powerless and hopeless. In Lost in Translation, Coppola tells the story of a strong, independent, intelligent and sexually aggressive young woman, who falls into the typical ‘vamp’ category. However, instead of punishing this character for embodying characteristics that have traditionally (or at least in the tradition of cinema) required punishment so as to reaffirm the patriarchal order, this character is valorized and rewarded for her personality. This film can be seen as a continuation of Coppola’s negotiation of the effects of male gaze from The Virgin Suicides, here evolving her discussion by positing a world in which women gaze freely.

These comments provide only a cursory overview, but this topic deserves more attention and research.