PARTISAN REVIEW
101
proach to films; and if American films have demonstrated greater in–
tegrity and maturity during the last decade, that is at least partly
be–
cause the
auteur
theory helped to instill in American directors a neces–
sary sense of self-respect. Ironically, it has also encouraged greater
ambitiousness and self-consciousness than could be found in the more
primitive genre films of
auteur
idols like Ford and Hawks, and the
auteurists themselves have not always been happy with the results. They
have made American movies respectable, but once something become
respectable, it loses its unpretentiousness. The modest, energetic, old–
straightforward genre picture - sacred to the auteurists, and also canon–
ized by Manny Farber (see his recent collection of criticism,
Negative
Space)
under the name of Underground Films - has just about dis–
appeared forever.
But whatever the fringe benefits of auteurism, the theory itself has
grave limitations, most of which were exposed by Pauline Kael ten years
ago in her superb essay, "Circles and Squares" (reprinted in her first
book,
I Lost It At the Movies).
Unfortunately, though Kael won that
battle in the pages of
Film Quarterly,
it is Sarris who has won the war.
The
auteur
approach to films is now deeply entrenched. The two
New
York Times
critics are committed auteurists, and, even more important,
in film schools everywhere, the
auteur
theory is now gospel; well attended
campus retrospectives center on the soap operas of Douglas Sirk or the
B-melodramas of.
~amuel
Fuller, and the program notes, full of arcane
references, are expanqed into doctoral dissertations. In another decade
or so, the
auteur
the~ry
could dominate all written criticism of fi\m. ·
Actually, the word "theory" is inaccurate; the
auteur
app~~~ch
reduces itself to nothing more than a ritualistic listing of favorite direc–
tors. In Sarris's pantheon of directors (see
The American Cinema)
some filmmakers are arbitrarily assigned to the magic inner cirle, others
to the despised outer circles, and although there are feeble attempts to
explain these distinctions - through references to "personal style" and
"mise-en-scene"
-
they remain true mysteries, outside the realm of rea–
son. Sarris himself offers a warning in the introduction to his collection
of criticism,
Confessions of a Cultist:
"Of course, lacking intellectual
discipline, the passion of a cultist could be perverted into mindless mys–
ticism and infantile irrationality."
To say that works of ai t. exhibit a personal style is, in one sense,
a truism, a point so obvim.is· that it should hardly require emphasis.
But in another sense the mystique of "personal style" is a dubious basis
for a critical theory.
It
is true that one can observe the same themes
and obsessions in a number of Hawks's films: the code of the profes-
