Wenders hired 3D expert Alain Derobe to assist. Rather than filming the dancers from a distance with a still camera, Wenders and Derobe decided on occasions to place the camera close to the dancers and to follow them. This technique placed the film spectator right next to the action, and captured the volume of the dancers’ bodies and the intensity and energy of their movements.
Pina is the first European art house film to be made in 3D.
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The cinema of Kathryn Bigelow
From the 1970s onwards, the number of women entering the American film industry rose significantly due to changes in the structure of the industry. Previously, the industry acted as a type of ‘closed shop’ that largely excluded women from above-the-line jobs such as directing or producing. During the early history of the American film industry (1895 to the 1920s), there was only Alice Guy Blaché (see Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché) and Lois Weber working as directors. In Hollywood’s classical period there was only Dorothy Arzner, who directed films such as Christopher Strong (1933), Craig’s Wife (1936) and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), and actress Ida Lupino who also directed Outrage (1950), The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and The Bigamist (1953).
In the 1970s, Joan Micklin Silver began as a feature director on independent features such as Hester Street (1975) and Between the Lines (1977) before moving on to mainstream studio films like Crossing Delancey (1988) and Big Girls Don’t Cry… They Get Even (1992). Gale Anne Hurd moved from independent production to major studio pictures with The Terminator films (1984, 1991, 2003), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Dante’s Peak (1997) and Hulk (2003). Susan Seidelman set out to work in the low-budget independent sector. Her first film, Smithereens (1982), was made for $80,000 and became the first independently produced American film to be accepted in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. She then moved to bigger-budget studio movies such as Desperately Seeking Susan (1985).
Penelope Spheeris, Stephanie Rothman, Amy Holden Jones
and Martha Coolidge began their directing careers by making exploitation movies. Some revised the exploitation from a woman’s perspective. In Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971) a woman played the vampire and men were the victims,
reversing the usual genre conventions, while Holden Jones’s Slumber Party Massacre (1982) is a woman’s slasher movie.
Other women directors, including Amy Heckerling, Susan
Seidelman and Marisa Silver, graduated from film school, while 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 107
Penny Marshall, Jodie Foster, Sondra Locke, Barbra Streisand and Sofia Coppola moved from acting to directing.
Kathryn Bigelow entered film-making via art school. In her feature films she takes a European Art Cinema approach to Hollywood’s traditional masculine film genres. She partly subverts those genres by combining them into one film, creating hybrid genres. Her 1987 film Near Dark is a hybrid between the horror-vampire movie and the Western, for example.
In terms of stylistic traits, Bigelow’s films:
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consist of a strong, distinctive visual style based on moody (for example, blue-tinted) lighting and visceral textures 3
3
consist of an editing pace that goes from one extreme to the other: it is either slow, as in The Loveless (1982) and The Weight of Water (2000) or hyperkinetic, most especially in Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995), The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
3
3
contain homages to classical films.
In terms of themes, Bigelow’s films consist of:
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rebellious male characters and strong androgynous female characters
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3
representation of a counter-cultural lifestyle as an alternative to the dysfunctional family
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graphic depictions of violence, such as rape and murder.
Some critics also identify a lack of narrative coherence and motivation in Bigelow’s films, although this, in part, is due to her transformations of traditional genre codes. We shall now look at her early film The Loveless to see where her innovative film-making techniques were first manifest.
ThE lovElESS
In August 1981, Bigelow (and co-director Monty Montgomery) took her debut independent feature film The Loveless to the Locarno film festival. Made for less than $1 million, the film stars Willem Dafoe in his first leading role as a leather-clad biker who stops in a small Southern rural town with his gang 108
to get a bike fixed. The film explores the extreme contrast and hostility between the locals and outsiders, who represent a counter-cultural lifestyle to the locals. Critics perceived the film as dealing only with style and surface features (‘its lovingly assembled props and wardrobe’ as one critic put it) with very little story holding it together: the Coca-Cola vending machines, music boxes, cars, old advertisements and pin-up calendars seem to become the film’s main focus.
The film had a protracted release, finally opening in Los Angeles in September 1984, three years after its first screening (the original title of Breakdown was changed to The Loveless in 1982). The difficulties Bigelow encountered with this film (and others) may not be due simply to its focus on surface detail, but on Bigelow’s art house re-working of traditional Hollywood male genres.
The Loveless is a homage to and re-definition of the biker teen movie, epitomized in the classical Hollywood film The Wild One (1953) and further developed in Kenneth Anger’s underground film Scorpio Rising (1964). The Loveless therefore combines (and mediates between) the aesthetics of the classical Hollywood film and the underground film.
Bigelow explains the deliberate lack of cause–effect logic in the film:
the loveless was a psychological bikers’ film. We wanted to suspend the conventional kind of plotting where everything spirals into problem solving after problem solving, and create a meditation on an arena, on an iconography, using the bikers as an iconography of power.
Quoted in Christina Lane, ‘From The Loveless to Point Break: Kathryn Bigelow’s trajectory in action’, Cinema Journal, p. 65
Bigelow is not simply using the iconography of traditional genres, but is taking one step back to create a meditation on the iconography of genres, a position that, some critics say, makes The Loveless appear to be a cold, emotionless film.
The Loveless foregrounds one of the most common characters in Bigelow’s film-making: the androgynous female. Telena 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 109
(Marin Kanter) in The Loveless is followed by Mae (Jenny Wright) in Near Dark (1987), Megan (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Blue Steel (1990), Tyler (Lori Petty) in Point Break (1991), and Maya in Zero Dark Thirty (2012).
There is violence in The Loveless, but far less than in other Bigelow films such as Blue Steel, Point Break and Strange Days.
No rape is shown on screen (as it is in Blue Steel and Strange Days), but it is implied (in the form of incest committed against Telena). We need to keep in mind that The Loveless is Bigelow’s most explicitly independent art house movie. She co-wrote and co-directed it, and it has a leisurely pace, like many independent films.
Her next film, Near Dark, also represents a counter-cultural lifestyle. A hybrid horror-vampire movie and Western, it has a cult following. Her following films gradually become more studio oriented – Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days, K-19
(2002), The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) –
although they still (to a greater or lesser extent) mix genres and contain an art house sensibility. Only in the Weight of Water did Bigelow return to a more overt independent style of film-making.
Bigelow’s status as a Hollywood film-maker raises an important question: Should women specialize in making feminist films?
ShoulDWomenSpecIalIzeInmakIngfemInIStfIlmS?
The opportunities are still limited for women in Hollywood –
in
terms of both directing and producing – and so it seems appropriate for women to exploit their chances by developing women-themed film projects that rarely get made in Hollywood.
Holden Jones said the following about her film Love Letters (1983): It’s feminist in that it’s rare to have a film that’s entirely about a woman, and an experience that’s very female, and which treats her and her female friends as worthy of sustaining an entire movie, focusing on her relationship with her mother as opposed to some guy’s relationship with his father or friends for the hundredth time.
Quoted in Hillier, The New Hollywood, pp. 130–1
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Seidelman meanwhile says that:
All my films have a strong female protagonist, and I’ve always tried to show the women from an insider’s point of view as opposed to an outsider’s point of view.
Quoted in Hillier, The New Hollywood, p. 131
And Coolidge said about her film Rambling Rose (1991): A man might really have simplified the women in this movie and cast Rose as a bimbo. I felt that I was sympathetic to the male point of view but I was also the guardian of those women.
Quoted in Hillier, The New Hollywood, p. 131
However, Mary Lambert, who directed Pet Sematary (1989) and The In Crowd (2000), and Bigelow argue that the label
‘woman director’ is sexist, since the job of director is genderless in its classification: directing is not a gender-defined skill. Being labelled a woman director can restrict the kind of material a film-maker has a chance to work with. ‘This notion that there’s a woman’s aesthetic, a woman’s eye, is really debilitating. It ghettoizes women’ (Bigelow, quoted in Hillier, p. 127). Both Lambert and Bigelow have managed to make horror and action-oriented films, genres usually thought to be masculine. But do directors such as Lambert and Bigelow simply end up imitating male directors? In the end, what counts in Hollywood is the box office, Jim Hillier reminds us. If a women-themed movie makes money at the box office, then more will be made. This places an extra pressure and responsibility on women directors to make commercially successful films.
The contemporary auteur
The auteur is no longer just a critical category, but also an industry category. In contemporary Hollywood, this is due to new production practices. Instead of the assembly-line production of the old Hollywood system, where stars, directors and technicians were tied to long-term contracts, in 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 111
contemporary Hollywood, talent is hired on a film-by-film basis.
Rather than a few directors being defined as auteur s, every director has to set him- or herself up as an auteur in order to get work. Directors must establish for themselves a distinct visual style so they can be considered for a particular project: By treating film-makers as independent contractors, the new production system places particular emphasis on the development of an idiosyncratic style which helps to increase the market value of individual directors rather than treating them as interchangeable parts. Directors such as Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, Brian DePalma and David Cronenberg develop distinctive ways of structuring narratives, moving their camera, or cutting scenes which become known to film-goers and studio executives alike. The emergence of the auteur theory in the 1960s provided these directors with a way of articulating and defending these stylistic tendencies as uniquely valuable.
Henry Jenkins, ‘Historical Poetics’ in Approaches to Popular Film, Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich, p. 115
Spotlight
One can argue that contemporary Hollywood directors are
marketed as auteurs, with their own brand image. The director’s name is used to achieve pre-production deals (as a director’s name can guarantee to the studio executives a certain style of film-making) and particularly in the distribution and marketing of films: Batman and Robin (1997) is identified in its trailer as ‘A Joel Schumacher Film’, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) is clearly identified as ‘A Steven Spielberg Film’, and so on.
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Digdeeper
Caughie, John (ed.), Theories of Authorship (london: British Film institute, 1981).
A representative sample of essays on the various schools of auteurism, although Caughie has taken the liberty of shortening a number of the papers, in some cases quite drastically.
Cook, Roger and Gemünden, Gerd (eds), The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (michigan: Wayne State university Press, 1997).
A wide-ranging collection of essays that serves both as an introduction to Wenders’s cinema and a detailed discussion of specific films (including Until the End of the World and Wings of Desire).
douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock (Paris: 1967; Cahiers du Cinema, 1999).
elsaesser, thomas, ‘Germany’s imaginary America: Wim
Wenders and Peter Handke’ (1986), available from the
author’s website: http://www.thomas-elsaesser.com/index.
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=78&itemid=68
Hillier, Jim (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950 s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, mass: Harvard university Press, 1985); The 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (1986).
the first two volumes in a three-volume series publishing representative essays from Cahiers du Cinéma. An indispensable collection.
Hillier, Jim, The New Hollywood (New York: Continuum, 1993).
my account of women film directors working in Hollywood is indebted to Hillier’s chapter, ‘unequal Opportunities: Women Filmmakers’, pp. 122–42.
Jenkins, Henry, ‘Historical Poetics’ in Joanne Hollows and mark Jancovich (eds), Approaches to Popular Film (manchester: manchester university Press, 1995), pp. 99–122.
Jenkins offers an overview to the internal (or poetic) approach to the cinema. A useful supplement to the first part of this book.
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 113
Jermyn, deborah and Redmond, Sean (eds), The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor (london: Wallflower Press, 2003).
A series of academic essays on Kathryn Bigelow, including a detailed case study of Strange Days.
lane, Christina, ‘From The Loveless to Point Break: Kathryn Bigelow’s trajectory in Action’, Cinema Journal, 37, 4 (1998), pp. 59–81.
A scholarly examination of the first four films of Bigelow’s career, focusing on gender issues.
mcmahan, Alison, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2002).
A detailed history of the work of the first woman film-maker.
Perkins, Victor, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972; New York: da Capo
Press, 1993).
An important book on the criticism and evaluation of narrative films. Perkins combines the approaches of both the realists and formalists (see Chapter 1 of this book) by arguing that film is a hybrid medium, consisting of both realist and formalist tendencies. to be evaluated as good, each film needs to create a balance between realism and formalism. A film can achieve this balance, according to Perkins, by firstly producing images that conform to the realist principles of credibility (of being ‘true-to-life’), and secondly, by unobtrusively adding symbolic meanings (or significant form) to these realistic images.
Rohmer, eric and Chabrol, Claude, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (New York: ungar, 1979).
the first book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, first published in French in 1957 by two prominent writers for Cahiers du Cinéma.
Sarris, Andrew, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions: 1929–1968 (New York: da Capo Press, 1996).
First published in 1968 and fortunately republished by da Capo Press, this is the bible of auteur studies. the 11 categories in which Sarris places various directors (‘less than meets the 114
eye’, ‘make way for the clowns!’) may be a little quirky, but the dictionary-length and mini essays on, predominately, American directors are in
valuable.
Shivas, mark, ‘minnelli’s method’, Movie, 1 (1962), pp. 17–18.
Shivas examines how Vincente minnelli’s films transcend their scripts via mise-en-scène.
truffaut, François, ‘A Certain tendency of the French Cinema’
in Bill Nichol (ed.), Moves and Methods (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1976), pp. 224–37.
truffaut’s celebrated and controversial attack on the French
‘tradition of quality’ and his promotion of the film director as auteur.
Vincendeau, Ginette (ed.), Encyclopedia of European Cinema (london: Cassell, 1995).
A comprehensive and informative reference book with a slight bias towards French cinema. the longer entries are particularly valuable.
Walker, michael, Hitchcock’s Motifs (Amsterdam: Amsterdam university Press, 2005).
the author painstakingly enumerates the major themes and motifs that recur in Alfred Hitchcock’s films.
Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films (london: Zwemmer, 1965).
Wood’s celebrated auteurist study of Hitchcock, revised and updated several times since its first publication in 1965.
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 115
focuspoints
✲ The aim of the auteur policy is to distinguish between directors as artists ( auteurs) and directors as mere technicians ( metteurs-en-scène).
✲ An auteur is a director who manifests a consistency of style and theme across his or her films.
✲ The director is privileged by auteur critics because he or she is the one who visualizes the script on screen.
✲ The auteur policy was formulated by François Truffaut in his essay ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, in which he attacks the French ‘tradition of quality’ school of filmmaking, particularly for its over-reliance on scripts. Auteur critics privilege the work of Hollywood directors (including Hitchcock, Hawks, Welles, Lang, Ford, Sirk, Fuller and Ray) whose visual style transcends the scripts imposed on them by the studios.
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