David Lynch's directorial films such as, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive offer us good examples for discussing the difficult subject of the author in Film. From watching and experiencing films such as these, the audience may often be able to pinpoint the very 'Lynch' like qualities of the film, which as we know, boil down to some rather glaring stylistic qualities that are shared between his films. Noticably the juxtaposition of jarringly different music in the opening scenes, melodrama, hyper close up shots (showing some sort of imagery) are some aspects that we may decipher to be very Lynch-like. This focus on the 'autuer-structuralism'' (Crofts 1998, p89) may give rise to the idea that these stylistic decisions might imbue on Lynch the position of an author. This is however a false assumption. Particularly, the elevation of the director of the piece disempowers the 'authorship' of say the set designer, scriptwriter or the producer in the collaborative process of film-making, in the sense that the director cannot fully control the individual's organic interpretations of the original piece of film writing, based on their own cultural, creative and societal skills, experiences and beliefs. Sure, a director may well modify the product of these, criticise and harmonise these together, but he does not have ownership of the crew's thoughts and ideas in relation to the concept or idea. As Croft posits, the challenge to Autheur theory is the idea of communication, and that later theory has criticized the idea of a "transcendental subject in full control of the meanings she or he somehow directly communicates to the reader". (Crofts 1998, p.89) Furthermore, as I personally watched clips from Lynch directed films, I noticed a number of significant differences in the pieces (particularly when considering Inland Empire), where opening credits were removed, human faces were blurred out, and the lack of a jarring juxtaposition of the narrative, and music. What we see to be structural authorship, based on clear similarities between work, is actually a rejection of the problem of difference in the acceptance of homogeneity through the director. Perhaps, though, as argued by the writers of Cahiers du Cinema, the authorship lies in the pure aesthetic of the mise-en-scene - in essence the 'style' of the piece. I think that in considering this standpoint, it must not be forgotten that, the Cahiers' point of view was inherently political (To elevate film into the same landscape as fine art), in describing the similarities between art forms asserting that as much as the painting has an creator, the film therefore must have an author - the director. However, by limiting the film to the style of the mise-en-scene, we see then that the supposed author has appropriated and interpreted the idea, an idea that, prior to his interjection, was perhaps not his own. A tricky idea then is that of creation vs interpretation. For me, at the bottom line of authorship lies in the creation of the idea - surely the true author is the holder of the idea, the 'work', and therefore anyone who employs this idea interprets and influences the piece based on their own culture and experiences. This applies to the director, the producer, the scriptwriter. I firmly believe that there are no 'original ideas', since these ideas are formed out of our cultural and societal existence. Barthes' 'The Death of the Author' (1967, '77), implies that the focus should then be on the reader or audience, who populates the work with meaning, and this is true, in the sense that there never was, or has been an 'author' in the classical sense (Barthes, 1967, '77). So why do we continue to foster the myth of the director as the author, and particularly in reference to Lynch, why are there, Lynch 'fans'? I think the answer lies in the idea of belonging and expectation, based on a cultural reverence of the individual and the name. As Croft points out, the name David Lynch cannot be void of meaning, and taps into our semantic memory, providing associations and expectations of a piece of work he is attributed to. This point is further developed in Foucault's writings - "an author's name performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function...It establishes a link between the texts."(Foucault, 1969, p.107). This is certainly true of Lynch, one cannot say the name David Lynch without bringing to mind a swathe of cultural and filmic references, often classified together. This however is the crux, of the matter, in that David Lynch himself is no longer the author of these films, but the works are appropriated by the audience to give reference to a single figure, rather than the author being the single owner of 'The Work'. In fact, the author is in fact a "projection...of the operations we force texts to undergo...the continuities we recognize" (Foucault, 1969 s p.110).
The film going experience is said to be 'a suspension of belief', I believe that in the reverence of the director such as Lynch, we are trusting an almost God-like figure, who will deliver to us the pleasure of the satisfaction through the use of particular techniques, particular to the director's style of film making. The suspension of belief requires trust, and we place that in a person attributed to the film, often the director or perhaps even an actor. In essence the audience are the subjects and we place our faith, or even our love into the piece. Furthermore, since we are not only the subject of the film, but also the subject of marketing and advertising strategies, we are constantly reminded who directed the film that we enjoyed, and this is particularly focused around the cult of the individual. Since a film title is never the same twice, marketing strategies focus on the constant (the director), who, since the beginning of franco-american auteur theory, has been the predominant figure in film theory in the 20th century. This pre-occupation with the director is a cultural construct, based around our need to hang our beliefs on an individual that we trust, as we would a God, or perhaps in a Freudian sense, a Mother. This belief and trust in the individual director's creative influence on a piece of work, should not be confused with authorship however, as it is clear that the director can never be the sole creator of the moving picture as a piece of art.
References
Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' (1967) in Barthes' Image, Music, Text. (Glasgow: Fontana 1977)
Stephen Crofts, 'Authorship and Hollywood' in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.) The Oxfod Guid to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?' (1969) in Paul Rainbow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)
No comments:
Post a Comment