Uploaded 1 March 2001

I am speaking of the auteur in a strict sense of the term: the auteur of literary or artistic works. Not the auteur of a crime, nor a theorem, nor even the Universe.
– Marc Le Bot [1]

E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (US 2000) stages an elaborate conceit from an imaginary or speculative history of film. Nosferatu (Germany 1922) is being shot, and no one except the director knows that the actor playing the title role, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is really a vampire. With a gleeful disregard for the chronology of global art movements, Merhige and writer Steven Katz present this fiendish pact as Method acting gone mad – their recreated Nosferatu, in its process of ‘unbecoming’, anticipates postwar psychodrama, a confusion art and life, performance and reality. On this surface level, Shadow of the Vampire has more in common with contemporary movies about the filming of violence (like Man Bites Dog [Belgium 1992]) or sex (Boogie Nights [US 1997]) than with the heyday of German expressionism.

But Merhige’s fantasia becomes more resonant when considered as being primarily about its director figure, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931). For the purposes of this movie, who is Murnau – or, more precisely, what image of the auteur does he allow us to entertain? Merhige and Katz seamlessly layer several such images. Murnau the great artist, the ‘visionary’, painstakingly talking his actors through each scene. Murnau the dandy-eccentric. Murnau the on-set tyrant. Murnau the international man of mystery and myth – a media celebrity of his day, whose guarding of privacy led to the proliferation of rumours about his spiritualist and occult practices, his Eastern philosophical beliefs, and his mooted bisexuality. John Malkovich – an actor who increasingly gravitates towards non-psychological modes of performance in films by Raul Ruiz, Michelangelo Antonioni, Manoel de Oliveira and the like – projects with unerring accuracy the pure presence of a tabula rasa upon which this palimpsest of marks identifying ‘Murnau’ can be inscribed.

So we have the fiction of Murnau – like Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang, a filmmaker whose life easily transmits itself to contemporary biographers as a juicy roman full of intrigue (the original title of a splendid book by Bernard Eisenschitz is Roman Américain: les vies de Nicholas Ray). [2]  But there is a deeper, almost allegorical level to this tale, since the contemplation of Murnau – again like Hitchcock or Lang – inevitably generates a meditation upon the cinematic apparatus itself, in the terms sketched by Thomas Elsaesser:

… the act of seeing, the constraints and power-relations it gave rise to, appeared so uncannily foregrounded that the action always tended to become an adumbration or metaphor of the more fundamental relation between spectator and mise en scène, audience and (invisible, because reified) director. [3]

In this light, Shadow of the Vampire is a particular variant of the films-about-filmmaking genre – it is a tale of the irrevocably ‘haunted screen’ (the title of Lotte Eisner’s book on German expressionist cinema), [4]  cinema as through and through the medium of the uncanny and the undead, like Vernon Zimmerman’s Fade to Black (US 1980) or Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (US 1995). This is what the fictive Murnau’s ‘realism’ – or, more authentically, the real Murnau’s aesthetic theories of ‘animism’ (“What I refer to is the fluid architecture of bodies with blood in their veins […] the formation and destruction of a hitherto unsuspected life”) [5]  – trigger: an allegory of the cinema as vampiric, that which recreates the life of the world by, at the outset, capturing and draining it. This is the true ‘vampire’s shadow’ cast in the title. And, in its apocalyptic ending, this fantasia joins up with at least one other biographical testament to filmmaking as inexorable, immoral tragedy – Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart (US 1990): both films end with the solemn ritual of the director-figure as dark demiurge intoning ‘action’ or ‘cut’, as if that unreeling of celluloid within a camera was driven less by mechanics than by the Faustian pact secured by the compulsive vision or Will of an auteur.

There is one further layer to this game of mirrors, since Merhige, as director of the film we are watching, can hardly avoid entering into a simultaneously delighted and troubled relationship of identification with his seductive, demonic, driven hero. Merhige wisely does not attempt a too-close mimicry of Murnau’s style for the presentation of his own tale (as distinct from the carefully mocked-up bits of Nosferatu, reminiscent in their hyperreality of Tim Burton’s A-movie pastiches of Z-movie style in Ed Wood [US 1994]). But, all the same, his sense of rhythm, of staging action, and especially of framing – for the fictive Murnau and perhaps also for his real model, only that which comes inside the force-field of the static, immaculately worked frame is truly alive – owes a lot to the Master. Merhige – whose gruelling experimental feature Begotten (US 1991) conjured an obscure, primal, mythic violence and resembled (as the director put it) a piece of refuse dug up from deep below the earth – has found a path to fiction, character and the cool, thoughtful layering of subjective and objective perspectives through his disquieting ‘exchange’ with the spirit of an imagined Murnau.

* * *

… auteurism exists largely for the convenience of critics and other packagers. It’s mainly a way of reading movies, not of explaining how they’re made.
– Jonathan Rosenbaum to Jim Jarmusch [6]

There is invariably a strange and charming ‘alienation effect’ when one revisits the hot polemics of an earlier period. In 1974, American scholar Charles Eckert, noting “the disintegration of the whole formalist-idealist endeavour” in cinema studies, dramatically observed that “there is a stiff, cold wind blowing against partial, outmoded, or theoretically unsound forms of film criticism – and it might just blow many of them away”. [7]  This was an early bulletin in the Anglo-American ‘film theory’ revolution. Eckert’s prognosis about the state of his field already equivocated between a sense of intellectual euphoria and a dread of professional fatigue; between the thrill of a terrorism that one might be in a position to inflict and the fear of terrorism that one might too easily end up in a position to suffer:

[F]ilm study is becoming increasingly demanding, just in terms of the organisation of one’s work, since everything needs to be pursued at once, presented at once, theoretically validated as it is presented, and subjected to scrutiny in terms of one’s motivations for establishing categories and arriving at solutions (which in turn, in the interest of truth, must be converted into problems of a new order). But maybe this is where film study is, since we are increasingly intolerant of self-serving narrowings of the field of inquiry (“I want to write about Delbert Mann”) and expedient defenses for methods of study which “get results”. (65)

It has become a standard editorial move for any positively inflected collection on an ‘old’ theme – such as style, aesthetics, genre or auteurism – to herald itself as part of the heroic ‘return’ of that particular, unfairly forgotten or suppressed topic to the agenda of professional cinema studies. While I would like to cloak this collection with the paradoxical glamour of an old-but-new wave, I am not sure that this description would be exactly apt or true. ‘Auteurism’, although it has been strongly challenged in theory, has never really gone away in practice. And it proceeds in a largely unsystematic and impulsive way, from one manifestation to the next, because cinema studies, if we can even meaningfully cohere it as a ‘field’, seems to me more ad hoc, less programmatic and agenda-driven, than is sometimes assumed (or wished). Cinema studies, taken globally and in all its forms (including those that go on outside universities) is not one ‘mind’ with a Will and a single direction; nor can its manifestations be exhausted in the image of the bloody clash by night of a number of major ‘schools’ of thought.

This project for Screening the Past began with an unpolemical aim: to survey what is going on at present in the domain of what could be called auteurism or (less colourfully) ‘director studies’ – those critical, historical and theoretical works which, in whatever way, take the film director as the organising centre of their analyses. As it organically unfolded into something more than an impartial map of current work, this collection formed itself into an obsessive investigation of often obscure impulses: those of auteurs, and those of auteurists. And, given the open-endedness of these impulses, plus the multiple uses to which they can be put, mightn’t the statement “I want to write about Delbert Mann” be a valid starting point (as valid as any other, at any rate), after all?

Boiled down to its essentials, classical auteurism is a quite simple principle, with two emphases. Firstly, it is a proposition about the making of films: that a film’s director can be rightly pinpointed as the one most responsible for its art and craft. Secondly, it is a statement about understanding films: that one good way to explore and interpret films is through focusing on the ‘signature’ or traces of the director’s style, ‘vision’ and recurring concerns. Not necessarily the best or only way – although it may have sometimes and in some places seemed so during the 1950s or ’60s – but an enabling way, nonetheless. As Tag Gallagher suggests in this issue (“Reading, culture, and auteurs”), the “utility for regarding a director as auteur is the richness of experience that may result”. Such passionate engagement with an auteur – by whatever means we construe him or her in our minds – can be about something grander than simply ‘getting results’.

Of course auteurism, like any method or theory whatsoever, has indeed produced many rote analyses and responses – dry structuralist tabulations of motifs, banal notations of recurring material, unimaginative interrelations of style to content. What auteurism sometimes ‘discovered’, in its most naive moments, and attributed to the one-and-only genius of a director, was often in fact more readily derived from convention, genre or the wider culture. This is why auteurism, at the points where it eroded and got swept under a carpet, easily gave way to ‘historical poetics of cinema’, to cultural studies, and to the sociological analysis of studios, eras and ‘national imaginaries’. This was the programmatic ‘move’ announced by Peter Wollen in the revised, 1972 edition of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, in terms that were both theoretically driven and pragmatic: “I do not believe that development of auteur analyses of Hollywood films is any longer a first priority”. [8]

But personally, taking the long view of global cinema criticism, I cannot doubt that writing about directors has been, and continues to be, among the most searching and satisfying approaches to this medium. Something more than a mere ‘principle’ – and something other than an expedient defense for a method of study which ‘gets results’ – has to be at stake here. I am reminded again of Elsaesser’s reflection (cited above) on the past, present and future of auteurism:

The auteur is the fiction, the necessary fiction one might add, become flesh and historical in the director, for the name of a pleasure that seems to have no substitute in the sobered-up deconstructions of the authorless voice of ideology. (11)

In fact, one way to schematise the current range of director studies – and to map the diverse impulses underlying it – is to imagine the auteur in two quite different forms: as a real, historically determinate individual; and as an abstraction, a ‘fiction’, an image. Neither approach is necessarily more ‘true’ than the other; both are enabling mechanisms for serious, detailed work. And we do not need to set these conceptions up in polemical opposition to each other; they are often intertwined.

Many attacks on auteurism inflated the perceived ‘enemy’ created by its “formalist-idealist” methodology into something truly fantastic: the director/auteur not as worker or artisan or wily operator, but a dreaded ‘romantic individual’ of the kind that can only exist in myth. In practice, even those who launched the missiles of anti-auteurist rhetoric tended to proceed with critical business as usual: few ever stopped speaking of Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Campion, Hitchcock or John Cassavetes as if they were no longer in charge of the movies they signed. This is also the case, more recently, with the flamboyant gestures of anti-auteurism issuing from directors themselves – as in the Danish ‘Dogme’ manifesto, which decrees that films made under its aegis be anonymous – instantly reassigned by popular journalism and criticism alike as quirky directorial statements.

Emerging from this fog, some now seek to understand the materiality of creative and industrial processes: how a director’s ‘vision’ is formed in collaboration with others, and how it is subject to many kinds of decisively constraining and shaping influences. This is the domain of “explaining how they’re made”, what William Routt has recently labelled a “cine-pragmatics” reflected in Stephen Frears’ credo as a filmmaker: “all problems are technical”.[9]  Thus, in this instalment of Auteurism 2001, Roger Hillman explores the collaboration between Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his regular composer, Peer Raben; while, in the next instalment (issue 13, June 2001), Chika Kinoshita proposes a new way of understanding the working relationship between Kenji Mizoguchi and his favourite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka. The question of influence – and the recasting of ‘sources’ from art, literature, music and philosophy – is taken up by Gino Moliterno in his treatment of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Sweden 1985).

By the same token, a number of the analyses showcased here – such as Brad Stevens on James Toback and Sue Gillett on Campion – for the most part invoke, in that ‘old fashioned’ way, only the name of the central auteur. And why not? Support for such an invocation comes from Gilles Deleuze, who (in the following assemblage of three separate quotations) offers an intriguing defense of a history of philosophy – or cinema – based on a parade of ‘proper names’:

I recognise the name of Kant not in his life, but in a certain type of concepts signed Kant. Henceforth, one can very well conceive of being the disciple of a philosopher. If you are situated so that you say that such and such a philosopher signed the concepts for which you feel a need, then you can become Kantian, Leibnizian, etc.

If concepts are the object of a creation, then one must say that these concepts are signed. There is a signature, not that the signature establishes a link between the concept and the philosopher who created it. Rather the concepts themselves are signatures.

The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts. (…) [the cinema] forms part of art and part of thought, in the irreplaceable, autonomous forms which these directors were able to invent and get screened, in spite of everything. [10]

Auteurist criticism has long spoken of the ‘personal visions’ and ‘world views’ of directors, and this noble tradition is continued here in the work of Gallagher on Edgar Ulmer and (in issue 13) George Kouvaros on Cassavetes and Fiona Villella on Jarmusch. Deleuze’s approach strengthens this apprehension: the concepts which an artist thinks with and through are creative, they conjure and constitute entire, unique, self-contained worlds that run on distinct, at times surreal logics. Such an entering into ‘personal worlds’ inevitably leads writers into excavating long ignored aspects of aesthetics, stylistics and mise en scène: Ulmer’s incandescent lighting; Cassavetes’ volatile framing of human gesture; or Jacques Becker’s ear for sounds and rhythms, as explored by Jodi Brooks in her analysis of Le trou (France 1960).

The happy inclusion here of these less-written-about figures indicates another drive of contemporary auteurism: to get past the constrictions of earnest canons and unbending mantra enumerating a mere handful of ‘greats’ (a constriction to which even the works of Wollen and Deleuze are sometimes prone), and refind the vital energy and exploratory drive of the auteurist endeavour before it ossified into its ‘classic’ manifestation. Issue 14 (September 2001) will showcase a prominent aspect of this revitalisation of auteurism: the study of contemporary directors who themselves cagily gleefully ‘intervene’ into given forms and genres. This section features Rose Capp on Chantal Akerman; Angela Ndalianis on Paul Verhoeven; and Philippa Hawker on Kathryn Bigelow.

Deleuze chooses to sever the link between ‘signature’ and ‘person’ in invoking an auteur’s creation. This, too, is familiar from a tradition in film theory and criticism. It signals that line of thinking which derives from Michel Foucault’s meditation on the ‘author function’, the circulation of an author not as biographical entity but as ‘name’ or commodity. One kind of work that has branched out from this insight is historical and materialist: analyses of the ‘making of reputations’, the ‘subject of history’ or celebrity images. [11]  Tim Groves’ essay here studies a case in which the popular and critical conflation of an auteur with his literal screen ‘image’ becomes especially sticky: Clint Eastwood.

Another kind of work on signature is post-structuralist: the signature floating free, borne on the waves of image, sound and ‘writing’, that last word understood in its most forceful and active sense. Tom Gunning’s recent book on Fritz Lang (which deftly mixes historical-materialist and post-structuralist modes) begins with the paradox of this ’emblem’ of the auteur’s signature – Lang often used inserts of his own, writing hand in his films – in order to trace the ‘loss’ of the auteur (and his megalomanical, enunciative control) in the worldly eventuality of the work it produces. [12]  William Routt’s essay here further explores this paradox by examining the legacy of Lois Weber through the concepts offered by Maurice Blanchot on the ‘exigency of writing’.

Dana Polan, in his contribution, directs our attention to the doubleness of ‘desire’ in auteurism: there is desire of the auteur, and desire for the auteur. And thus, if the director is at one level a fiction or phantasm, we inevitably and necessarily come to examine the critic and the various, complex ‘investments’ that are made by him or her in the desiring creation of auteurs. Auteurism 2001 proposes a range of responses to the question of what this desire might entail. Ken Mogg’s piece on The Birds (US 1963) and recent commentary upon it looks for a way of grounding discussion of Hitchcock in a method that is not merely piecemeal or opportunistic – Eckert’s blast at “self-serving narrowings of the field of inquiry” finally comes home to roost – but apt, exact, encompassing, and existentially truthful, including being as true as possible to what we know of the work practices and sensibility of the director. Mogg thus finds his most faithful ‘mirror’ in the philosphical writings of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Groves, for his part, looks to Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of forgiveness to understand the ‘affective investments’ of a critic in a work. Stevens offers a distinctive twist in this labyrinth of desire when he suggests that “we cinephiles are nothing more than the wandering ghosts of those mythical popular audiences who once visited the cinema regularly” – implying again, like Elsaesser, that the auteur may be the “name of a pleasure” rather than the name of a person. And, in this light, we can equally understand the practice of other writers, no less on the track of understanding this enigmatic and elusive pleasure of the movies, wanting to displace the name of the author, which they envisage as a blockage of critical flow: “My own analyses nowadays almost always place ‘the film’ where the name of the director used to be placed (…) The author is the identity we can do without” (Routt) [13]  Or consider this statement by Philip Brophy, one of the most thoroughly ‘intertextual’ (and least auteurist) of major critics:

I prefer to treat the movies as though they have lives of their own; as though they are working together, talking and referring to one another, reworking each others’ forms, styles, contents and themes. That’s why I’ll always enjoy writing about a group of movies rather than a single film. [14]

Experiments in intertextual auteurism – based on generative comparisons between directors – are the basis of a section in Issue 14, including pieces by Bill Krohn on Alain Resnais, Gallagher on McCarey, and myself on Abel Ferrara. But even these mappings hold firm to a ‘personal’ orientation. For persons – individuals – will never be absent from auteurism. The lingering problem with auteurism is not some residual ‘romanticism’ but the question mark it raises about the – undoubtedly ‘humanist’ – category of the individual. In this sense, battles over auteurism may be an expression of a greater cultural war, rarely named and hashed out as such: the contemporary struggle between humanism and anti-humanism. Polan’s meditation arrives at a suspended conclusion: “There is no need to study the film director but there is also no need not to study the film director”. Why this ambivalence about the centring of film analysis on individuals? Polan’s doubts are political: the study of individuals may more easily lead us away from thinking about social, intersubjective and collective processes than towards it (even though many conceptual tools for the latter task are already available). Again, it is a matter of circumnavigating critical blockage, wherever and however it looms. But can we be so blasé, so fickle, about the ‘call’ of the individual auteur and its siren-like effects upon us?

Cinema studies as a ‘field’ also has a problem with individualism or, more plainly, good old individuality – by which I mean the indviduality of critics or theorists, the potential, powerful singularity of their personal visions and unique voices. For film theory must also be, applying Deleuze’s terms, an act of creation, an invention of a ‘virtual cinema’ – and this invention can be radically different for each person who writes and speaks. The surrealist credo of the “indestructible nature of the interior poetic voice” [15]  (so richly embodied by Petr Král and testified to in his tribute, translated and reprinted here, to Tarkovsky) might help film theory, as a collective endeavour, to fully reclaim and embrace its many ‘eccentrics’ (from Vachel Lindsay to Stanley Cavell via Pier Paolo Pasolini). This might also help it to reach beyond the boundaries of the academy, since those critics who mostly toil in journalistic fields can, of necessity, more easily and readily lay claim to their ‘voice’, and to the auto-didactic sophistry of ‘inventing cinema’ for their readers or listeners.

The individual, these days, marks an excess in the system – every kind of system, political, intellectual, economic. And the particular kind of cultural economy which binds the individual who is an auteur to the individual who is a filmgoer remains charged with a magical, primitive, old-fashioned energy that is forever bound up with but also forever outside the social contract: an economy of the gift, which is also (at least potentially) an economy of excess and surplus. Every cinephile knows this thrill: a film which strikes us a gift, a gift from someone, somewhere, however tantalisingly clouded and mysterious in origin.

Auteurism taps into the doubleness not only of desire but of art itself: art which is simultaneously rooted in a specific place and time (as political materialism teaches us) and gloriously detached from any place and time, floating in the cultural ether until it reaches us like a lightning bolt. Cinephilia would not exist without this kind of revelatory experience: the mad but certain thought that Sergei Paradjanov (for example) speaks to me, that he might have made his films for me, even as I understand so little of what formed his life as a ‘historical subject’; and then the compelling conviction that, thus ‘summoned’, I must bear witness to this revelation, tell its story in the words of the critical act. For the economy of the gift is also an economy of (phantom) friendship, and of quasi-divine ‘election’.

The best criticism, I believe, goes on to explore the ‘otherness’ of the art-object in two directions at once: it tracks mystery to its real-world source in history, nation and culture – a speciality of Screening the Past, reflected here again in Sian Reynold’s presentation of Germaine Dulac – but also expands it to a virtual infinity. This is how we can encounter the auteur as simultaneously a real artisan and a fantastic apparition.

* * *

I am listening to a gift – the boxed CD set of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (France 1988-1999) – and trying hard to follow its text, laid out as blank verse, in the accompanying book. It is a mysterious, disorienting and somewhat spooky way to experience this monumental 4 hour work, without the slightest indication of what is in the image-track and the intertitles, or any identification of the various actors and speakers. At the end chapter 3 (b), “A new wave”, a dialogue takes place between Godard and a woman. I see a setting: the ‘imaginary museum’ constructed by Godard himself in his speculative and very personal cinema history. The auteur – casting himself with typical self-lacerating irony as a raving curator or maybe just a clownish janitor – fields a complaint from a spectator:

we saw endless photos of works
but never of people

that’s what it was, the nouvelle vague
the auteurs’ policy
not auteurs, works

Godard replies:

your friend is right, mademoiselle
the works first
then the men
Then the sophistic dialogue takes a number of successive sharp turns, whereby this distinction – between individuals and works – is quickly morphed into a duality of heart (which the curator/filmmaker is accused of lacking) and labour.

you can film labour, mademoiselle

not hearts

But – in the next conceptual twist – what if we live in “a time of unemployment”? Now hands (performing the labour that produces works) are opposed to hearts in Godard’s spiel. He turns the tables on his interlocutor: unemployment (worklessness) means too many idle hands, but that’s not where the real challenge lies:

it’s a time of too many hands
and not enough hearts
yes, a heartless time
but not workless
when a period is sick
and doesn’t have work
for all the hands
it’s a new challenge
that confronts us
the challenge of working with our hearts
and I know of no period
not yet
that didn’t have work for all the hearts

Having found herself back to her own initial affirmation of heart, the woman then anchors the debate in an irrefutably personal reference.

all the same
Becker
Rossellini
Melville
Franju
Jacques Demy
Truffaut
you knew them all

And Godard replies not merely for himself but also, in a sense, for all impassioned auteurists:

yes, they were my friends [16]

My thanks go to everyone who has worked so tirelessly on this project for Screening the Past: Peter Hughes, Ina Bertrand, Caroline Kruger, Sam Hinton and Val Forbes; plus all the contributors, translators and referees. Auteurism 2001 is dedicated to the memory of Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999).

Note: Auteurism 2001 will be continued in two separate supplements over the next two issues of Screening the Past. Issue 13 (June 2001) contains: a focus on Kenji Mizoguchi, with essays by Chika Kinoshita and Tag Gallagher; and a section on “Personal visions”, with George Kouvaros on John Cassavetes, Fiona A. Villella on Jim Jarmusch, and Anna Dzenis on Michael Mann. Issue 14 (September 2001) comprises essays by Rose Capp on Chantal Akerman; Angela Ndalianis on Paul Verhoeven; Bill Krohn on Alain Resnais; Tag Gallagher on Leo McCarey; Philippa Hawker on Kathryn Bigelow; and Adrian Martin on Abel Ferrara.

Footnotes:

[1] Marc Le Bot, “L’auteur anonyme ou l’état d’imposteur”, Hors cadre 8 (1990): 11. My translation.
[2] English translation by Tom Milne: Bernard Eisenschitz, Nicholas Ray: An American Journey (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).
[3] Thomas Elsaesser, “Vincente Minnelli”, in Rick Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical (London: British Film Institute, 1981), 10. Further references parenthesised in main text.
[4] Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkely: University of California Press, 1969).
[5] Quoted in Scott Eyman, “Sunrise in Bora Bora”, Film Comment (November-December 1990): 79.
[6] Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dead Man (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 84.
[7] Charles W. Eckert, “Shall we deport Levi-Strauss?”, Film Quarterly 27.3 (Spring 1974): 65. Further references parenthesised in main text.
[8] Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, second edition (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 173.
[9] William D. Routt, “Misprision”, forthcoming in an anthology on the films of Fritz Lang edited by Douglas Pye for Cameron Books (UK); Stephen Frears, “Alexander MacKendrick”, in John Boorman and Walter Donohoue (eds), Projections (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 68.
[10] Gilles Deleuze, “Vincennes session of April 15, 1980, Leibniz seminar”, Discourse 20.3 (Fall 1998): 79; “Vincennes session of April 22, 1980”,http://www.imaginet.fr/deleuze/TXT/ENG/220480.htm; Cinema 1: The Image-Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xiv.
[11] See, for a range of examples, Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); Dugald Williamson, Authorship and Criticism (Sydney: Local Consumption, 1986); and Hors cadre 8 (1990), devoted to “the state of the auteur”.
[12] Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000).
[13] William D. Routt, “Pieces”, Screening the Past 10 (July 2000).
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/brfr10a/Pieces/preface.htm
[14] Philip Brophy, Restuff: Horror, Gore, Exploitation (Melbourne: Stuff, 1988), 3.
[15] Jean Schuster interviewed by Paul Hammond, “Specialists in Revolt”, New Statesman 2958 (4 December 1987): 23.
[16] Jean Luc-Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma (Germany: ECM, 1999), 69-70.