Death to the auteur, all hail the producer!
“I’ve been extremely saddened by the way cinema has narrowed its language and created an alphabet that’s never been poorer,” says director László Nemes.
French film director and enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard declared the auteur dead way back in 2011, and I’ve been thinking exactly the same myself recently. It was the likes of Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, as young film critics before they became the French New Wave of filmmaking, who practically invented the concept of the auteur, fawning over over-looked directors such as Hitchcock and Hawks and declaring them creative auteurs, that is, authors in control of their material, with themes running through their work, much as a painter or indeed an author might have.
The concept caught on, and from the 1960s onwards, the director was king. In the States in the 1970s, auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and Robert Altman seemed to have the power to make what they wanted. In Europe, directors such as Fellini, Bergman, Kubrick, Polanski and Tarkovsky exemplified the arthouse auteur aesthetic.
But in recent years these auteurs have got old, stopped making films, or died, and maybe I’m just less interested in film but nowadays I see less of the director and more of the producer.
During the Golden Age of Hollywood (circa. 1915-1969), the producer was creative king, with classics like the Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind famously produced by Mervyn LeRoy and David O. Selznick, respectively. It’s less known that both films were directed by Victor Fleming, who should presumably be a famous director, creating two of the most brilliant American films ever made – and in the same year (1939), yet his name is barely mentioned in film history. Fleming was a studio director, churning out dozens of films for MGM. As a director for hire, directing was presumably a job for Fleming, rather than an artistic expression (I’ve mentioned this previously).
Nowadays, TV, film and streaming services have become more business-like than ever, with franchises and profits being talked about far more than concepts of art, beauty or personal expression. Like Fleming, directors nowadays are guns for hire, doing the job a studio or producer demands. The studios nowadays are bigger than the studios of the Golden Age – Amazon, Netflix, Disney and Marvel have taken over our lives in ways Hollywood in the 1930s wouldn’t have been able to dream of.
Kevin Feige is president of Marvel Studios and, since 2007, the primary producer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. His combined worldwide box office gross of over $26.8 billion makes him the highest grossing producer of all time. His film school application was rejected five times before he got in on his sixth attempt. The first films he worked on were You’ve got Mail and Volcano (both terrible) – I don’t know, to me, he has more in common with a hedge fund manager than someone involved in a creative industry. Yet Feige is generally considered to be the creative force behind all 23 MCU films.
In 2019, Martin Scorsese caused a storm by saying Marvel movies are ‘not cinema’, and likened them to theme parks. Then other elderly directors chimed in, with Coppola calling Marvel films ‘despicable’ and Ken Loach labelling them ‘market exercises’, ‘a commodity which will make profit for a big corporation – they’re a cynical exercise’ and, well, ‘boring’, which about sums them up for me.
In the same year, Son of Saul director László Nemes tried watching a superhero film: ‘I found it unwatchable and false, boring and self-referential, a world of ideal people who don’t behave as humans but more like machines.’ Quentin Tarantino said that original movies are in a war with superhero and Star Wars franchises.
As Scorsese mentioned in 2019, there are auteurs out there – ‘Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson’ – but their works are drowned out by the studios churning out big budget, homogenous crap.
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