Hats off to Mike's and Dan's thoughtful posts.

A short answer to Dan: I don't attempt to construct a personality for
an auteur. I'm looking for something else. When I look at NBNW, I am
not thinking about Hitchcock's personality. I'm thinking about his
art. And I know a lot about Hitchcock's personality! Ditto for Fuller
and Boetticher, whom I knew well: When I watch China Gate or Seven
Men from Now, I'm not thinking about Sam and Budd, except as artists,
and strangely, I don't see much of the man in the artist. The films
are always a surprising revelation to me of "who" the men I knew
really were - a misleading way to put it, because that "who" isn't a
person in any of the usual senses. Maybe I'm arguing for a theory of
artistic impersonality? I'm not sure. The one case where this may not
apply to how I saw the films in the early days is Hawks, where
certain eccentricities I loved in the films did suggest a "person"
behind them. But I wouldn't see them that way today.

Here's an offbeat approach to the person behind the film, a site that
lsts auteurs religions. It's of dubious value whatever version of the
auteur theory one has, but I thought I'd share it:

http://www.adherents.com/movies/adh_dir.html

I would also say that know ing auteurs, what I do carry away from the
encoubnter is usually respect for the person's intelligence, which is
great in the case of Fuller or Boeticher, say. And I have never been
disappointed in an encounter with someone who's work I love, because
the personality is always a big, stron, original one. But it isn't
what I love in the films.

Mike, as always your scientific approach to the problem is
intriguing, but not one in which I recognize my own auteurism. I fear
that the thing I'm looking for is exactly what you summed up a few
posts back as an "indescribable something" - I think you put it
better. I would only add that I've spent my life trying to
describe "it" as scientifically as I could. That said, there are
certain genres I love - they happen to be the same as yours - and I
am, on a purely sensuous level, more fond of color than camera
movement - I love Kubrick's use of color. But if you add up all the
things in your list that I might check off as matters of taste,
they'd still amount to about 50% of what I believe I'm responding to
in a film I admire, with the other 50% being the overall form,
ineffable as that may be - the first 50% is not a suficient reason
for proclaiming someone an auteur (or a cineaste, as I'd say today),
although they may be reasons for me to watch a lot of shit. I am even
quite comfortable repsonding positively to work incorporating
elements repugnant to me - I have been seeing a lot of serial killer
films lately, and they generally disgust me - or films where
the "inferred author" seems to me ro be a repellant human being.

One thing that has now changed the equation a bit, re: the human
being behind the film, is DVD commentaries, which I listen to. I
would have given Hostel points for certain things, until I heard the
cackling asshole who made it on the DVD commentary, and since then I
wonder if I got it wrong. (I'm told a lot of wghat's good was added
to the script by Tarantino. Still...) But I remember meeting the
author of The Blue Iguana for a presskit interview and finding him
terribly obnoxious -not a bad guy, just obnoxious. I still watch his
films. I think he "has something." And I suspect his unfortunate
personality has kept him from making a name for himself in the
businss. It isn't what I watch his films for, however.