Occupied Territories

Much of the shattering impact of [the shower scene in Psycho] derives from Bernard Herrmann’s score. Hitchcock’s original intention was to release the shower-murder sequence with no musical accompaniment at all, but Herrmann prevailed on him to try it out with music.

—

William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze

Based on these assumptions, Hitchcock is still partially responsible for the music in Psycho: Herrmann may have had a great idea (not to mention the fact that he composed the music), but Hitchcock listened to him, despite his own initial instinct to have no music playing during the scene, and then considered it a good enough idea to use it. This anecdote may reveal something about Herrmann, but it arguably reveals more about Hitchcock. Even when a director makes a creative decision that turns out to be an artistic mistake, we benefit more by considering why he made this decision than we do by imagining how we would have done it differently (and better).

(via occupiedterritories)

I think it’s worth remembering that the specificity of this example is less important than what it suggest about hypothetical examples, and about how the idea of authorship can be problematic (in a way that both is and is not specific to the cinema). You could well be right that Hitchcock is ultimately more responsible for “allowing” the Herrmann score in the final cut of Psycho, but what’s important, I think, is that he might not have been—it might, as you mentioned yourself, have been the result of a producer’s decision, or it might have been done without Hitchcock’s explicit knowledge or awareness. If we can remember always that a director may not have been the sole authorial figure or the person in control of every creative decision, we are liberated from that fallacious framework from within which we privilege the author above all else. You look instead to what the film itself does: Psycho uses music during its most infamous scene. Who is responsible for that music is valuable information, but it is biographical information, and is thus outside context—it shouldn’t be central to our perception of its meaning. Skip over “intention” and move right into “reading”, you know?

Another way of saying the same thing: since the specific machinations of a work’s production remain permanently inaccessible to us, they shouldn’t be focused on too intensely. Otherwise you’re never going to be able to talk about Orson Welles as a genius (which I still think he is) and you’re never going to be able to talk about, say, Touch Of Evil without a ridiculous number of qualifying statements and potentially incorrect assumptions. Which is to say that while I do care what parts of Touch Of Evil were shot by Welles and which parts weren’t (as well as which parts were cut and which were rearranged, etc), I care more as someone interested in film history than I do as someone invested in reading Touch Of Evil itself. I think it’s a great film, but I don’t think I need to make some confusing case that the portions for which Welles was directly responsible are great while the rest is middling, or whatever. You know? 

(via calummarsh)

Allow me to lay some more cards on the table. First, I do agree in general with the points you made, especially what you mean when you say “Psycho uses…” As much as I am an auteurist (not necessarily a “hardcore” one, whatever that means, but a person who thinks auteurist criticism is valuable and, on some level, necessary), I do think that the focus must be on the film itself. For this reason, I really like the way Daniel Frampton frames these questions in his book Filmosophy. (I’m not sure I like that title, but I do really recommend it. And I think I need to re-read it myself.) Frampton coins two terms that I really like and that I think are necessary, but I’m pessimistic about them catching on at any meaningful level. These terms are “film-being” and “filmind.” In Frampton’s thinking, a film is a being in and of itself, almost usurping the intentionality and sovereignty of whatever we mean by the word “auteur.” More than this, a film “thinks.” Consider the way Frampton uses these terms (excerpt is located on Google Books):

 The concept of the filmind offers a radical yet practical framework with which to understand the creation and intention of moving sound-images—it is essentially behind the ‘primordial genesis of bodies’ (Deleuze). It is not an empirical description of film, but is rather a conceptual understanding of the origin of film’s actions and events. Being a conceptual construct and not an empirical explanation it resembles an urconcept, or urtheory of film—the kind of theory that comes before aesthetics and evaluation. For instance, as the ultimate controlling force (behind and before any possible ‘narrative’), the filmind can construct an autonomous invested world (such as Final Fantasy), significantly embellish a fictional one (such as Amelie), or apparently show realistic events (such as Rosetta). The concept of the filmind is there to help us equally understand Rosetta and Amelie, subtlety and extravagance. But significantly for a ‘film-being’, filmosophy wishes to place the origina of film-thinking ‘in’ the film itself. There is no ‘external’ force, no mystical being or invisible other. It is the film that is steering its own (dis)course.

Second, Frampton’s concepts dovetail quite nicely with the two strands of thought that have informed my own conceptualization of art over the years: Martin Buber’s thinking on intersubjectivity in I and Thou and my own studies of indigenous (particularly Native American) culture and thought, especially as it relates to the concept of being. For me, Buber solves a particularly prickly dilemma in our discussion of art, namely the tension between looking at art “objectively” and looking at it “subjectively.” A lot of arguments about art (in general or about specific works) really boil down to an inability to transcend these two modes of thinking (particularly as inherited from Cartesian thought). This is especially true when we discuss valuation: we know that art’s value is not able to be assessed objectively, but we also know that there must be a lot more to it than just our subjective responses.

Buber’s notion of intersubjectivity transcends this dichotomy, and when applied to art, the emphasis is on two intertwined concepts: being and presence. Another thinker who has hit upon this is filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, a passage of whose I have quoted here before. What Buber and Dorsky have both recognized about art objects (to simplify, let’s leave out discussions of art as ephemeral performance at the moment) is that they are a kind of congealed presentness. Dorsky refers to the experience of art as “a secret underground of continual transmission” of presence. This is the case for art that is physically, tangibly molded by the artist’s presence—such as sculpture, which bears the physical marks of an incalculable series of present moments of thought and action—and for art like a novel or a film. Whatever the case may be about Psycho, Hitchcock, and Herrmann’s music, the final “object” displays an accumulation of presence—right down to the decision, whosever it finally was, to use the music—and that presence is the substance of art.

Within Buber’s framework, in which he discusses how we relate to the world around us, it almost makes more sense to talk about works of art as beings in their own right, which is sort of what Frampton is getting at. This feels somewhat awkward to us, but for me, what simplifies and clarifies this notion is a more complex understanding of being, such as that of Native American ontology. (The classic text in this case is A. Irving Hallowell’s “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View” from 1960, but I’m going to speak more generally.) Western thought is plagued by the notion of the self as a stable entity, but Native American ontology—there are variations, of course, but I’m going to generalize—understands being as something that is constantly shifting. And the “continual transmission” Dorsky speaks of is the transfer of being/presence from a person to an art object. Native Americans also have a keen understanding of the “transmission” of being, which explains why they value certain objects like eagle feathers (which, they understand, transfer part of the being of eagles to a person when they are incorporated in his/her garments) or the possessions or bodily remnants of departed people (much like the role of relics in Catholicism, which has always had one foot in indigenous culture and one in modernity, and other religions.

Hallowell began his exploration of Ojibwa ontology through linguistics, when he discovered that in the Ojibwa language rocks were considered “animate” (as opposed to inanimate, a linguistic dichotomy somewhat like the use of male and female nouns in, say, Spanish). He asked an Ojibwa man if that means that all rocks are alive, and pondering that question for some time, the man finally responded, “No… but some are!” Leaving behind how you feel about the idea that some rocks are alive, the point is that this man doesn’t know about the “being” of a rock until he encounters a specific rock. This extends to people too, given Native American thinking about shapeshifting, etc. It’s not that jumping rocks and shape-shifting people make Native Americans think about being in this way, but rather the opposite: Native American thinking about being leads to these ways of thinking about and understanding rocks and people. This way of thinking about being also challenges Cartesian dualism regarding objectivity and subjectivity, and it’s for this reason that the strand of anthropology most in tune with all this is called “post-Cartesian anthropology.”

But to return to art, I think we can apply these concepts to your criticism of the author. I’m somewhat fine with the notion of the author, but admittedly, that notion has mutated in my head because of my way of thinking about intersubjectivity and being. A very classical author-focused mode of criticism posits the author as a stable entity, who is discovered through rigorous analysis of his/her works. This doesn’t fit at all with, for example, a Native American understanding of being, which I think more accurately reflects how art actually works (which is why I cherish it so much): the author is always changing, existing within a pure flux of being. Some post-Cartesian anthropologists speak of “dividuality” as opposed to “individuality,” the latter being a notion of being as a stable point while the former conceptualizes being as something more like a flow in a vast network of interconnections. The artist creates art as a kind of snapshot of presentness at any given moment (or really, series of moments, time being more wave-like than pointillistic ), presentness being a sort of manifestation of being (at a particular point in time). Not only do I think this accurately reflects how art works (whether for Native Americans or for us), but I think it goes a long way towards explain why art matters and why it is valuable.

Of course, given this, auteurism is still relevant, because the ever-shifting quality of being does not preclude some kind of continuity of being: if individuality presupposes stability, then dividuality is not about the complete absence of stability—a wholly random plotting of states of being—but rather about how being is shaped by a series of interconnections, both spatial (between ourselves and the rest of the world) and temporal (between past selves and our current state of being). Individuality represents a point in space, defined by its not being every other point, whereas dividuality represents a temporary position (presentness, being) in an always moving stream of “beingness.” An auteur exists within this stream of being, as a kind of directionality, not as a stable, unchanging entity tossing out film after film from behind some fortress wall that forever ensures his/her identity as essential and permanent. Buber’s discussion of intersubjectivity and love—that somehow, love is all about the willingness to re-meet a person again and again, due to the fact of this flux of being—is also a good caution to auteurists: if auteurism means anything, it is all about the necessary process of re-engagement, not sweeping and essentialist statements.