How to Watch a Movie

0:05Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry. And I'm Vincent Cunningham. Now, each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How are you guys doing? Doing great. Doing good. Well? The dog days of August. The dog days. Sorry. Sorry. It's been extremely fun to hear you two interviewing some of our illustrious colleagues this month. We've had Eric Latch. We've had Lauren Collins. I mean, it's been fun. Oh, it's been fantastic. What a run. And now it's my turn. Today I'm talking to none other than Richard Brody.

0:50Hells yes. Yes. Yes. My guy. The man, the legend. The beard. The beard coming down from the mountain. I wanted to talk to Richard because he is, yes, a cherished colleague and friend, but he also happens to be one of my very favorite writers and critics, like ever. He teaches me something every time I read his work. He has incredible opinions that really get the people going. And most importantly, he writes like a dream. Today, we're talking about a lasting point of interest with Richard. The figure of the auteur, from the French New Wave to A24. And we're going to talk about what auteurism did for mid-20th century arthouse cinema and how those ripple effects are showing up today in the works of filmmakers like Spike Lee.

1:39And I also want to know how Richard feels about the criticisms of art tour theory that have emerged over the decades, including, I should say, in our very own magazine. The big question I have is what the future holds for the singular artist with a burning vision. So that's today on Critics at Large, auteur theory.

2:07Richard, it is so good to have you here. Thank you for coming on Critics at Large. I can't tell you what an honor it is to have you here. Vincent, it's an honor to be here and it's a great pleasure to see you. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Yeah. So we're going to talk today about something that I know is important to your formation as a critic, but also as a lover of cinema, which is auteur theory. And I think the reason to do this is not so much to put forth like an educational sort of manifesto, but to really, if I could think of an alternate title for this, it would be just how to watch a movie.

2:45Just looking at a method of enjoyment, I guess. First of all, before we even get into it, is that how you receive auteurism as an idea, as a way to sort of focus your attention and your enjoyment of the movies? Well, it's how I receive it personally, but I think it also connects essentially with the very history of the idea. I mean, the very peculiarity of what we're talking about today is the fact that we're using the French word for author to describe good directors. Yeah. And the question of why we do so gets to the very notion of what we're looking for in a movie. Mm-hmm. The reason we're here is that a bunch of young French critics in the late 40s and 1950s had this idea, but even more, they had this experience of movies.

3:38and the experience of movies that they were having was a sort of immediate communication with the omnipresent but completely invisible director. And the reason why they had this connection, whether they were watching an obvious arthouse-type movie like films by Robert Brisson or Carl Theodore Dreyer or watching Hollywood movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray, is that they themselves were not actually critics. They were masquerading as critics. They were all future filmmakers. They wanted to be filmmakers. They were thinking like filmmakers, and they connected with filmmakers.

4:20They had this experience of an artist present there. They essentially were saying, these are our people. These are the people whom we want to emulate. And what was controversial about it was not that they praised directors as artists. That was a longstanding practice and criticism going back to the 1910s. What was novel was the idea of seeing Hollywood directors working within an ultra-commercial, ultra-controlling system as the artistic equals of filmmakers working in more forgiving systems. and, what's more, discerning through the conventions, through the commercial constraints, the full power of their artistry.

5:10Now, who are we talking about? What are some of the names that are sort of most important in this moment in, as you say, criticism and proto-filmmaking? Well, the Hollywood filmmakers they took to most strongly were Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, so much so that when they started writing in the newly founded Cahiers du Cinéma, which was born in 1951, they got the nickname of the Hitchcock-O-Hawksians. And who are the critics? Oh, and the critics, well, the critics are Jean-Luc Godard, who was born in 1930, François Truffaut, born in 1932, Jacques Rivette, who was a couple of years older, Claude Chabrol, who was around the same age, and Rerick Romer, who was born in 1920.

5:52Yeah. It's so interesting because, as you say, we're using the French word, auteur, but so much of it, there's this kind of transatlantic motion because they're looking at America, the Hollywood movie in specific, and at a certain moment, their insights make it back to America. How does that bouncing, that transatlantic hopping of ideas occur, do you think? Well, it occurs problematically. You know, you opened the discussion by talking about the auteur theory. They didn't call it the auteur theory. They called it the politique des auteurs, policy but also politics. One of the reasons for their passion for movies, for wanting to be filmmakers and seeing movies creatively, is that Paris is France's Hollywood, France's New York, and France's Washington, D.C.

6:42In other words, it is the cultural capital, it is the movie capital, and it's the political capital. Sounds like a nightmare. And there's very much of a political, an actual electoral political component to the passion for movies that these critics had. Because there was a great protectionist strain in France at the time, great anti-Americanism, both left and right. And they said, no, what matters is the politique des auteurs, and it's our politics, is art. Right. There are two reasons for this idea's migration to the United States. One is the prime reason why this idea has caught on around the world, which is these future filmmakers became actual filmmakers.

7:27So they validated the power of the ideas and the authenticity of their experience by the films that they made. Principally, the first feature by Truffaut, The 400 Blows, and the first feature by Godard, which was breathless. Yeah. And in so doing, they sort of set out the alpha and omega of first films. Truffaut, a personal story of his own childhood. Godard, the adaptation of an American genre. Yes. The gangster film. Yeah. So, in effect, what they gave America and the world was a permanent floating film school. In other words, you want to be a filmmaker, your school is the movie theater. Right.

8:07You kind of put forward two ideas that I think have everything to do with even how we watch movies today, which is on the one hand, the personal. And on the other hand, genre, which is also another way. You know, we talk about the Western and its constant applications to American life today, right? How genre is a vehicle for the personal. How did they understand genre as a sort of a place where a filmmaker could imprint his or her own vision? They understood it paradoxically. And that paradox continues to divide the world of movies to this very day. The paradox was the baby and the bathwater. The baby is the director and the bathwater is the industry of Hollywood.

8:50Right. Right. So when Godard made Breathless, he said, you know, he believed he was telling a realistic story. And only later, and not that much later, came to realize that he had in effect made what he described as Alice in Wonderland. That the Hollywood genres that he received were not images of the world. They were images of Hollywood itself. Yeah. And what has happened in the course of the years is that in embracing the babies of Hollywood, future filmmakers and future critics have swallowed a whole lot of bathwater. In other words, the genre has become not merely seen as a constraint, but seen as a kind of virtue, a sort of essential matter of filmmaking.

9:38Wrongly. Well, could we dig into Breathless a little bit and talk about, you know, what it does along the lines that you've set forward? Sure. You know, we're going to be talking a lot more about Breathless later this year when Richard Linklater's film Nouvelle Vague comes out because that's essentially a biopic about the making of Breathless. Right, right, right. So, Breathless is a crime story. Michel Pocah is a petty thief who steals a car, kills a police officer, drives from the south of France up to Paris, reconnects with his American girlfriend, and realizes he's being pursued by the police.

10:10He said, you are really disgusting.

10:18What is disgusting? That's the story. It's based on an actual crime in Paris in the early 50s. And the genre trappings of the film, according to the sort of, that really funny image you put forward, is that a wink toward Hollywood bathwater? Is that saying filmmakers have always been sort of constrained by, glued to this kind of genre dreck, and the art has been in circumnavigating that? He didn't see it as dreck. On the contrary, that's kind of the strange part, that he and his cohort believed what they saw. Mm-hmm. They believed in the Hollywood conventions as refracted but authentic representations of what was going on.

11:15As ways of acceding to forms of experience that a non-genre would leave in low relief. They were high relief ways of bringing out certain facets of the world, of American society. The problem was that Godard was filming in French society. But a French society that had been informed in some way by looking at American entertainment. In some way. But they didn't think of this as entertainment. They thought of this as art. In other words, they essentially thought they were watching Faulkner. You know, Godard in 1952 refers in a piece to, you know, the greatest American artist, Howard Hawks. He didn't say the greatest American filmmaker, Howard Hawks.

11:56In other words, they thought of, you know, Hitchcock and Hawks and Nicholas Ray and Preminger as the equivalent of the great writers of the day, the great painters of the day, the great composers of the day. And he's like, Hawks or Richard Wright, I don't know, this kind of thing. And that's another one of the peculiarities involved in the formation of the auteur idea or the politique des auteurs, namely the exaltation of what most people considered, you know, mere commercial art, mere entertainment as the great art of the day. Right. So when Godard was working in the gangster form, he kind of thought he was Dostoevsky in a certain way with crime and punishment.

12:36It was not literally, but he thought that by using genre, he was doing the same thing that the great writers, not just the great filmmakers, were doing. What happened is that he realized pretty quickly the radical gap between genre conventions and the world as depicted in genre conventions and his own experience, his own observations. Right. Didn't mean that he jettisoned genre. It meant that when he relied on it, he put it through the intense scrutiny of his own critical filter in filmmaking.

13:14In a minute, how the politique des auteurs evolved as it crossed the Atlantic. French did not cross the Atlantic to me. This is Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

13:34This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

14:18I want to move us toward how this apprehension of moviemaking has sort of continued to ramify, but I don't think we can do that without talking about a figure who I know is important to you, which is Andrew Sarris. I was thinking of a corollary to Andrew Sarris and my understanding of art in other forms. Who I was left with was Lee Strasberg, the famous teacher of acting who came into contact with the acting instructor, director Stanislavski and his methods and imported them to America. And in so doing, founded or helped to found what we think of as method acting. Um, Ceres was a fan and reader of Cahiers du Cinéma, the people that we've talked about, and translated their ideas.

15:07And he's the one who called it auteur theory in America. How did this method, how did this idea first make contact in America? What was the effect of this kind of translation by Ceres? I very much like your comparison of Sarris to Lee Strasberg, by the way, because the comparison I had been using until you said that was Julia Child. French cooking. Exactly. Fair enough. I like cooking, too. They were cooking. Every sense of that word. Sarris is a fascinating guy. He went to France and imbibed the films along with the criticism. But Sarris did something peculiar. Sarris, exactly as you said, called it the auteur theory.

15:54Now, for the French, it wasn't a theory. In other words, there was nothing to prove. It inspired them as filmmakers. Right. It was their practice. It was their guiding light, but it wasn't— It wasn't an orthodoxy that was imprinted upon every text they encountered or something like that. Exactly. And Sarris did something that was simultaneously heroic and ultimately a little reckless. because he had such enthusiasm for so many interesting American filmmakers. He created a sort of massive taxonomy. You know, is he right to be interested in John M. Stahl? Absolutely. Is he right to be interested in Bud Bedeker?

16:28Absolutely. But the best way to do that is to do it essentially freely as a critic rather than to look at filmographies and attempt to, you know, organize and canonize and assume that this theory is something that can be demonstrated empirically by way of analysis. Perhaps this is the American sort of Anglo-Saxon mind meeting a more poetic French sensibility. Exactly. Not to totally stereotype, but... No, exactly. And, of course, the problem was that Sarris, who was a genius of a critic, was still not thinking like a filmmaker. He was thinking like a critic. And he put an enormous target on the theory, and Pauline Kael shot very effectively at it.

17:12Pauline Kael, who was, of course, not at the time writing for The New Yorker, she was a longtime freelancer. She didn't land into New York until she was nearly 50. Pauline Kell had her own critical orientation, which was formed by her years of watching movies, especially Hollywood movies, in the 1930s when the studios were at their very peak of control over directors. Her idea of movies involved the popular movies that she enjoyed when she was young. the popularity that they enjoyed was part of their artistic virtues. Right. You could call her an early, the term did not exist, but you could call her an early poptimist.

17:52Exactly. So she never denied that directors were important in the making of films. But she saw some particular artistic virtue attaching to the very fact of popularity and the ambition of popularity. And what she certainly didn't like was the idea of canonizing films on the basis of essentially prejudice in favor of a particular director over another on the basis of their previous films. She also appreciated the idea of a well-made film in general. In other words, her praise went to professionalism overall. You know, the studio production with its producer intervening at every step of the process and shaping the script and having test screenings and having other directors come in to reshoot scenes to make the film work better for commercial release.

18:42You know, to her, that was not an industrial imposition on the directorial prerogative. It was how you made a movie good. Yeah. So because of this orientation, she was, to begin with, hostile to the very idea of looking, let's say, past or beyond the film to the personality of the director that's expressed in it. So when Sarris was praising these films with some fairly rigid theoretical structure, she rightly, in the name of the empirical fact of, you know, viewing experience, targeted it. And her debate tactics were really unfair. They were—she simply distorted the argument for the sake of making— We should say this largely takes place in a famous essay called Circles and Squares.

19:35Am I right? Is this the piece that you're referencing? That's the piece published in the relatively obscure film Quarterly. And it was extremely effective. Yeah. I'm sorry, I cut you off the extremely unfair. What were the methods? Oh, for instance, she, you know, she said these, you know, these auteur critics are all essentially overgrown adolescents who are looking to juice their masculinity by sitting in Times Square grindhouses getting off on, you know, tough guy movies. And, well, did they like tough guy movies? Sure, but they also like musicals. They also like, you know, movies by Douglas Sirk that were explicitly in the genre of women's pictures.

20:13And their interests went far beyond Hollywood to films by, you know, Kenji Mizuguchi, Max Ophilos, Jacques Tati. You know, they loved films of all sorts. They were not saying that, you know, these tough guy films, these films noir that we're watching in Times Square are the only kind of good movies there are. It was a kind of movie that they were bringing up critically and culturally to the level of movies that everybody recognized as great. They discerned that, in fact, many of these films that were received by their public as commercial trash was actually the work of artists whose inspiration was discernible throughout.

20:51You mentioned earlier on that the Cahiers crowd felt and acknowledged this intangible, invisible presence, that of the director. It seems to me that today the invisible figure that we hear from, notice the most, is maybe an inversion of the sort of move from old Hollywood to the moment that you're describing, which is like the studio has kind of reimposed itself as the sort of invisible figure. figure. I'm thinking, of course, about whatever you think of superhero movies, Marvel movies. It seems like the director is, again, in many commercial situations, again, a sort of worker for hire to deliver a vision that is not their own.

21:36First of all, do I have that right? And if I do, is that a problem that you think is, I don't know, worsening? Loosening? The studios and the producers were never really gone. You know, there was a blissful moment, which wasn't really that blissful, in the 1970s, or late 60s, early 70s, when the studios were having, forgive me for going like, for rewinding, but were having great economic crises. Hollywood was really out of touch. And so they basically handed the keys to the kingdom to a group of young filmmakers. And so you had this great outpouring of, you know, very interesting films in the 70s, whether by, you know, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino, so on and so forth, Elaine May.

22:20There were lots of really interesting films being made in the 70s. Then came Jaws, and then came Star Wars, and Blockbuster Fever, and the studios realized, hey, our goldmine involves control again. We figured out the formula. And the studios have never really been out of control. And you can see this in the next great crisis in Hollywood, which came in the 1990s, early 2000s, when big-budget movies were simply not really making much money. The big-budget realistic movies are what people love to celebrate as the mid-range drama for adults for the simple reason that they were already seeing this sort of, quote, film on television in the first big wave of prestige TV.

23:11So in the late 90s, early 2000s, the studios basically got out of that business. But there was still a business to be had. And it was independent producers, but at a relatively high level of investment. People like Megan Ellison, Bill Polad, Stephen Rails, who now works with Wes Anderson. Independent producers saw that there was a business to be made with the best Hollywood directors. that essentially, for a younger generation of viewers, the director was the product. In other words, auteurism had long taken over. Everybody, you know, has loved Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino.

23:49Well, some people didn't love Michael Cimino. And was that, by the way, was that a response from the filmmakers to these critical battles that were raging behind, we talked a lot about Ceres and Cale, but did filmmakers themselves take this on self-consciously as a project to say, no, no, no, I can make a film that, is more personal, and this being an inheritance of these earlier figures that we've discussed, the Scorseses of the world. Well, they did at the point that it became an option. In other words, independent filmmaking has, you know, kind of always existed in one way or another. High level like Charlie Chaplin, who owned his own studio.

24:22Right, right, right. Or, you know, lower budget like Oscar Michaud, who was an independent and owned his own studio. But it was only when filmmakers realized they had other options that they took them. In other words, it wasn't fun for Wes Anderson or Martin Scorsese to fight with the studios. Scorsese, when I interviewed him last year, he told me that he was so unhappy with his fights with the studio that he actually was going to leave filmmaking. He was going to stop making films. There was only access to independent financing where the producers were not going to be overbearing and were going to let him essentially make the film as he wanted to make it.

25:00That brought him back, Wolf of Wall Street. One of the great outpourings of, you know, directorial creativity. So these filmmakers, whether older like Scorsese or younger like Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola, all had another option. And that option was they would work with lower budgets. But it wasn't so much the movie that was the product. They were the product. Right, right, right. In other words, the fact of their name recognition had value to a generation of film goers who had been brought up on Scorsese and Coppola and De Palma and so forth. I mean, for instance, the last decade of Spike Lee's great artistry is a direct result of his working with producers who have allowed him artistic freedom.

25:46I interviewed him about this actually about a decade ago. And was he saying this because what you're describing sounds on the one hand like, you know, a great body of work can earn you on some level freedom, artistic freedom. And also it's like a kind of the other way to say it might be a contemporary patronage system or something like that. So was Spikes, was he saying this as gratefully or was it sort of like a recognition of how tenuous that position is? So around 11 years ago, you know, Spike Lee had made The Sweet Blood of Jesus, his remake of Ganja and Hess, with Kickstarter money. I remember that.

26:28He had made what I consider one of his best films, Red Hook Summer, with his own money. Right. So what I wanted to know when I went out to Fort Greene to see Spike Lee, my reason for going out to interview him was I wanted to know why he was not working. with independent producers the way that, you know, Wes Anderson was or Martin Scorsese was or Sofia Coppola was. And he told me what he thought. And this is, you know, this is in print. He told me, because they think I'm the angry black man, he said, I want to know the same thing. Where is my independent producer? Fortunately, they showed up. Amazon showed up for Chirac.

27:08Yeah. It's a great film. And since then, he's been working with many independent financiers, which is to say streaming services are independent financiers. They are producers who don't essentially need to maximize box office return. They need to maximize attention. And the name of Spike Lee is, as it should be, valuable.