Paul Gallagher wrote:

> But Cahiers
> obsessed over these questions. So there are differences in details,
> and some of the details are important: for example, the difference
> between criticism that can't understand the importance of Hawks and
> Nicholas Ray and one that does.

But you say that you're not familiar with pre-www2 writings, so how can
you make these remarks until you are?

I don't think Cahiers "obsessed" over these details. It was more the
Brits and Americans who've been pulling their hair out. Cahiers never
made any attempt to define what you call "auteurism"; they didn't have
that word. Each critic did his thing. Each of them, if pressed, would
have given you a different definition of "auteur." There was very
little in the way of theorizing. (I'm not convinced that there is a
difference between theory and criticism and bullshit, but to the extent
that theory is abstract, there was little of that, and Bazin is
deceptive, because he didn't realise his words were going to be
subjected to Noel Carroll.)

The difference between criticism that could/couldn't understand the
importance of Hawks was already apparent before Hawks's name was known.

> And CduC exposed the contradictions in
> the ideas of authorship. So it's not just the intuition that directors
> are authors, but of understanding why this is important, the ways in
> which it's right and the way in which it's wrong: the idea was once
> inadequately theorized; now thanks to Cahiers it's theorized to death.

No, it still has not been theorized. There is no definition of
"auteur." Even on this group, it's a free-for-all, and that's the way
it's always been. How can you talk about how "it" is wrong before you
define what "it" is? Every damning critique of "auteurism" I have ever
read has been logically true, because the criticizer has incorporated
the "flaw" is his initial definition. There's not even a sense of an
obligation to go back and read what people wrote in the teens, 20s and 30s.


>
>
> Someone in the audience at the Lincoln Center conference on Cahiers du
> Cinema mentioned that Cahiers raised many of the issues about realism,
> authorship, and meaning that were later to preoccupy much criticism
> and philosophy.

How could they have avoided doing so?
Even this group, in its short history, has done this.
Cahiers didn't "raise" these issues. They had been on the table for
centuries. The world did not begin in 1950.

>
> to use Foucault's words, they asked "What are the modes of existence
> of this discourse?" "Where does it come from; how is it circulated;
> who controls it?" "What placements are determined for possible
> subjects?" "Who can fulfil these diverse functions of the subject?" Or
> to use other words, they found in the cinema the Shadow "between the
> idea / and the reality / between the motion / and the act ... between
> the conception / and the creation / between the emotion / and the
> response."

Nothing novel in any of this. Had all be said/asked a zillion times
before. The difference was that Foucault was addressing people who
hadn't bothered to get educated.

>
>
> For example, these statements by Andrew Sarris from the early 1960's,
> so far as I can tell, seem to be ahead of their time: "interior
> meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director's
> personality and his material...

Talk about gobbledygook.
Put this into plain English, and I think your find people talking about
Griffith in the same tones prior to www1.

> imbedded in the stuff of cinema and cannot be
> rendered in noncinematic terms"


> That might be an example where
> Cahiers-ists were exploring new territory.
>
Wasn't new territory.

>