Word: auteurism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lead film commentator was Andrew Sarris, who boasted quite a reputation among film school cliques. He was the valiant proponent of auteur criticism (the reviewing wave of the future), banking in movies for their own sake and American ones in particular. The argument for him went this way. Sarris is the only critic to catch every flick in town, and immediately tell you the history behind the credits. He also cares about camera movements. The other critics and reviewers are politicos and literati in disguise...
Maria (Tuesday Weld) passes her days wandering about the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where she is a patient. "Nothing applies" she scrawls across the battery of psychological tests they give her. Her husband Carter (Adam Roarke) is a pompous young hack who makes motorcycle movies and discusses the auteur theory. His producer B.Z. (Anthony Perkins) tries both to meddle with and mend their broken marriage. Maria has already had one child-Kate, herself disturbed-and aborted a second. In her sickness and despair, she clings to Carter, who humiliates her with the kind of bitter brutality she usually heaps...
...Auteur critics will probably find Haas's camera angles impersonal and they are, each character being framed only in apt context. What we are sensually drawn by is the terse editing, the stylized settings themselves, and a set of performances impeccably unified in their theatricality...
Among the "classics" canonized in Confessions of a Cultist are Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Hitchcock's The Birds, Preminger's Advise and Consent. All are auteur genre items; Sarris rarely has the flexibility of such British auteurists as Raymond Durgnat to admit that non-auteurs can produce great films. Each has raw narrative material of questionable significance, and a blatant commercial bent which made the few respectable critics feel rotten and cheated the morning after, unless trash was all they expected...
Well, given an auteur who's also a good director, he will manage to come up with as good an explication of his films as most critics; possibly, because of his fine eve for visuals, a better one. He does champion such out-of-current mood directors as Peckinpah and Renoir; he is generally concerned with instituting fashion according to his own "impassioned" integrity rather than merely following the fashionable (though his recent 2001 recantation was curious indeed). With such developments as his labeling of Fellini as the "Busby Berkeley of metaphysics," and a latent inclination towards admirable historical research...