The Film Director as Superstar

Or: The death of the author auteur

The title here refers to the 1970 book by Joseph Gelmis. I haven't read it, but I saw the cover used on another blog site, where it was being discussed in relation to a quote by Bernardo Bertolucci, and the image captured my attention immediately. The book, as I understand it, is a collection of recorded interviews with a number of high-profile filmmakers that had emerged during the post-war period. Brian de Palma, Robert Downey, Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, Lindsay Anderson, Arthur Penn, Roger Corman, Richard Lester, Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick, among others.

The cover is fascinating because I can't tell if it's a painting or a sculpted model. I want to assume it's the latter, but I'm probably wrong. Chalk it up to my waning eyesight. However, certain elements of the image, the lighting on the hands, the texture of the jeans, the weight of the viewfinder and the perspective of the little director's chair, all have something more tactile and physical about them than a two-dimensional painting.

The Film Director as Superstar [Joseph Gelmis, 1970]:

I think there's something inherently arresting and exciting about the book covers from this particular period. Books published by Penguin and Pelican, specifically during the late 1960s and early 1970s, are always interesting and evocative in their design and illustration. I remember when I went to university, I'd spend hours in the library browsing the shelves of old books that had been collected from the decades before I was born. Books that had lived, that had been enjoyed, that had notes penciled into the margins by previous generations; books that in every sense of the word had a story to tell, their covers barely held together by sellotape yellowed by age.

To this day, if I'm looking for book recommendations, I'll browse old cover art online and become captivated by the presentation of a particular book, then find myself intensely disappointed when I find its more generic looking, modern-day incarnation.

Collage of old Penguin publications [John Greenaway, flickr.com, 2010]:

Many of these covers, and others, speak to me. Every one of these books looks like a must-read.

The cover and, I assume, to a large extent, the subject matter of Gelmis's book, mark it out as a relic to another time. On one level, its cover, no matter how captivating or "cute" it might appear, is a reminder that the history and legacy of the cinema was in many ways colonized by white men. White-male critics elevating the work of white-male filmmakers, often to the detriment of marginalized filmmakers from other backgrounds and persuasions. The director on the cover could have been modeled on Gordon Parks, Satyajit Ray, Agnès Varda, Ousmane Sembène, Marguerite Duras or Akira Kurosawa, all of whom were either superstars or on the road to becoming one.

However, a certain image, epitomizing what a film director looks like, had already been established during the early silent cinema, with figures like Erich von Stroheim, D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, King Vidor, Charlie Chaplin, Josef von Sternberg, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, many of whom continued their respective careers into the post-war cinema, adding to a collective shorthand for what a director was, looked like, or did. For the film culture of the 1970s, still enlivened by the then-recent innovations and provocations of Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and others, it must have been a difficult legacy to break away from.

And yet the book is also a relic in the sense that the director, at least as far as the mainstream cinema is concerned, is no longer a superstar. On the contrary, if directors during the post-war years were elevated via an engagement with the auteur theory into cultural "brand names" that could sell a movie to an audience as sufficiently as any Hollywood star, then the modern cinema, existing as it is side-by-side with serialized content, short videos and so-called "prestige" TV, is more preoccupied with companies and studios, be it Disney and Marvel, Netflix and Amazon, Warner Bros. and A24.

The franchise mentality that now infects all discourse surrounding the cinema means that the corporate brand has been elevated above the individual. Nobody cares who directs the latest Marvel superhero movie, or the next Fast & Furious sequel, or the next Star Wars or Jurassic Park spin-offs. This is because the vision of the director is no longer that important. When safeguarding the integrity and fandom of the IP and delivering content that will satisfy the largest number of viewers without causing offence or disappointment, the director becomes little more than a franchise custodian. A brand-guardian that exists to follow the instructions of the studio bosses, the test audiences, and the major theatre owners. They work to translate the studio-approved text into studio-approved images.

Fellini Satyricon (1969) vs. Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

[comparative collage created by the blog author]:

The director as superstar, as brand, as "auteur", replaced by the studio as brand, as author. Can you imagine a modern-day filmmaker being afforded such a level of cultural reverence that their name features not just above the title, but a part of it?

Tenet (2020) vs. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

[comparative collage created by the blog author]:

Christopher Nolan is one of the most acclaimed and successful "auteur" filmmakers currently working, but even after generating billions at the box-office, his name barely carries the same promotional weight as Kubrick's.

Perhaps a sequel to Gelmis's book could be called "The Film Director as Dependable Journeyman", or perhaps less sympathetically, "The Film Director as Cog in the Corporate Machine." Something that would express explicitly how undervalued the role of the director, not as superstar, but as artist, has become in the twenty-first century.

It's a shame too, as we're now at a point in the history of the medium where the diversity of voices working in the English-language cinema is becoming richer every year. There are directors as varied as Steve McQueen, Dee Reese, Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele, M. Night Shyamalan, Cate Shortland, Andrea Arnold, Ava DuVernay, Jon M. Chu, Greta Gerwig, Melina Matsoukas and Ryan Coogler among others, but in most cases these directors aren't dominating the discussion the way Hitchcock, Spielberg and Tarantino did. Instead, they've been forced to either sell out, to assimilate, to become subservient to the brands and the studios, or their work gets released onto Amazon or Netflix and becomes just another bit of product to be discovered.