> My guess is that, however complex Kubrick's approach might be, there's
> an element of actual lip-smacking there; and that I might be overly
> troubled by it, and am missing out on some other more interesting angle
> as a result. - Dan

I started thinking about this little statement that I just wrote, and it
triggered some thoughts about the problem of disagreement, and ultimately
led to the most persuasive argument *against* auteurism that I can think
of.

When we disagree about the value of an artist or a work of art, we wonder
how intelligent observers can be so far apart, not only in their opinions,
but also in their perceptions. One possible model for disagreement is
that one person has a wiser perspective on the topic at hand, and that the
other person simply has grabbed hold of the wrong end of it. In most
cases, this model is deeply inadequate from any objective perspective: it
doesn't account at all for the great coherence and thoughtfulness that we
often see on both sides, even when the positions are plainly mutually
exclusive. But, in our hearts of hearts, this is the theory that we
usually hold when we are one of the parties to the disagreement: our own
position seems so coherent that we suspect the wisdom or the motives of
the other party. Once in a while life presents us with an example of a
disagreement where one side is clearly better supported than the other,
and these occasional instances give us hope that maybe all of our
opponents are similarly misled.

What occurred to me this morning is that maybe we underestimate: a) the
incredible amount of data available in even the simplest work of art; and
b) the mind's ability to find strong, coherent patterns in even a small
collection of data. So, for instance, I come to Kubrick with a particular
heightened aversion to a certain acting style which is connected to a
certain personality trait. I identify this element, am ticked off by it,
and calibrate my perceptive apparatus so that I start picking up any other
element with some aspect in common. Because there is so much data in a
movie, I have no trouble finding lots of support for my initial aversion,
and in discarding the occasional data point that doesn't fit what I'm
looking for. Within minutes, voila! I have constructed a coherent
Kubrick-pattern that I call a sensibility. Meanwhile, other observers,
without the same baseline aversion that I have, not only construct a
different Kubrick-pattern, but also lack a slot in their Kubrick-pattern
to help them identify the traits that look obvious to me.

Last night I saw a Sundance movie that, as far as I know, has gotten
universal praise: HALF NELSON, by Ryan Fleck. I thought the movie was
extremely bad, and everything I saw in the film confirmed the impressions
that I formed in the first few minutes, so that after a while I simply
wasn't an alert observer. Because this movie hasn't got the established
support that Kubrick's oeuvre enjoys, I walked away thinking, rather
smugly, that all the other critics were probably just deficient in
artistic sensitivity. But I found that I was still a little troubled
afterwards: why did so many people, many of them respectable, go for this
bad movie? Looking more closely at my response to the film, I can see
that I prefer to ignore certain elements that aren't actively offensive.
24 hours later, I think back on these non-offensive elements, and I'm
almost able to remember the film without rancor. But, when I started
synthesizing a sensibility for the filmmakers, I preferred to leave these
elements out: they didn't fit.

This argument may not seem revelatory. But, in general, we don't treat
works of art as if they contain an excess of data points. In the name of
unity, we tend to see patterns and coherences.

And so I arrive at a troubling argument against auteurism: because the
essence of auteurism for me is the location of a directorial sensibility,
that unifying quality of personality that pervades a film and makes its
disparate elements line up in the same direction, like iron filings in a
magnetic field. What if looking for that sensibility gives too much play
to our own prejudices? What if it's a lot easier to construct a
sensibility than we think, and a lot harder to perceive our own role in
its construction? What if a commitment to openness leads us away from
patterns and coherences, including the ones that make auteurism appealing?

Bazin was clearly worried about this aspect of auteurism: "One sees the
danger, which is an aesthetic cult of personality." - Dan