I think one of the fallacies auteurists fall into in their defensive
mode is insisting that for an element of a film to reflect on the
director's themes, it must have been "created" by the director. In other
words, if I say that a cut in a Fritz Lang film is incredibly great and
connects with Lang's larger themes, and someone discovers that the
editor made the cut with no input from Lang, then some would say I was
wrong to see and discuss this cut in terms of Lang's style and themes. I
believe, by contrast, that I would be not wrong to do so.

Brakhage has a little known film called "Gift." It's not one of his
greatest works, but it's very good, and its imagery and rhythms are that
of a Brakhage film. But it's entirely a found object. Brakhage didn't do
anything to it at all, except make prints. He found it and thought the
decay patterns represented his aesthetic, so he signed and released it.

Similarly, there's John Cage's "chance music," at least some of which
really sounds like Cage. And Duchamp did not sculpt his "ready-mades."

These are extreme cases, but there are many related examples. Filmmakers
incorporate things that happen by chance during the shooting, for
example. Sumi ink painters don't control every shape on the page
exactly. Lots of artists work with the texture of their paper, even
though they didn't "decide" on where each hill and valley in the paper
would go.

What a great director does is produce, by some mysterious process,
imagery that materializes his vision, imagery that's both beautiful and
meaningful. A really bad edit can wreck such imagery (Fuller's "Shark"
would be one example), but especially in Hollywood films there are
editing conventions that directors expect will be observed. A director
provides an overall framework and way of seeing, and within that
framework a cut could function powerfully even if the director didn't
decide on it. The real test is in the subjective reaction of a viewer
who has carefully honed his perception and knows the director's work
well, not in tracing who did what. Sirk may not have decided exactly
where to intercut those torsos of dancers at "the party next door" in
"The Tarnished Angels," but the intercutting is devastatingly powerful
in a specifically Sirkian sense anyway, and beautifully foreshadows an
intrusion to come.

I'm not saying that editors or cinematographers don't have their own
styles visible across many films, and I'm not objecting to production
research. My only point is that just because a director didn't make a
specific decision, that doesn't mean that the effect of the element that
someone else decided on cannot become incorporated into the beauty and
meaning of the film when seen in terms of the director's oeuvre. Of
course, it's also true that not every decision in a film, not every cut
for example, is meaningful and beautiful.

About Hawks, I thought he told Bogdanovich that he worked on the editing
of all his films from the beginning. Who's right here? I've always
thought the editing in Hawks films was amazing, for the way it danced
with the body rhythms of the performers. But maybe the editing is pretty
standard Hollywood assemblage, and Hawks created imagery (camera
placement, actor movements, et cetera) that would combine with standard
Hollywood assemblage to produce the desired effect.

- Fred C.