Handing out the Oscar for best director three weeks ago, Emma Stone prefaced the award by suggesting the power and influence of that figure in the film-making process. “It is the director whose indelible touch is reflected on every frame,” she said. In any other year, that statement would have sounded uncontroversial; it has, after all, been integral to the notion of auteurship since it was first expounded in the late 1940s by André Bazin. And it was Andrew Sarris, courier of those ideas to English-speaking readers in the early 60s, who explained that an auteur should have an “identifiable personality” and bring “interior meaning”.
But these are more than usually troubled times in the film industry, and the assumption that the director is present in every frame becomes problematic once that same director turns out to be a liability. It is one thing separating the art from the artist: reprehensible people frequently make great films, and vice versa. But how do we square that with the cult of the auteur? If the value of a movie can be attributed to a single film-maker, it becomes that much harder to argue that extracurricular misjudgments – and even crimes – can be expunged from what is on screen.
The most notorious cases have been rehearsed too widely to need replaying here in any detail – Roman Polanski raping a 13-year-old girl – after he allegedly gave her quaaludes, then fleeing the US to escape sentencing; Tippi Hedren claiming that Alfred Hitchcock bullied, intimidated and sexually assaulted her during the making of The Birds and Marnie. The instance of Woody Allen is slightly different: although never charged with molesting his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, the accusations – which he denies – will dog him as long as Farrow herself still insists on his guilt.
There are other auteur-related horror stories. We know now, as viewers did not at the time of the release in 1972 of Last Tango in Paris, that Bernardo Bertolucci deliberately neglected to warn his 19-year-old star Maria Schneider about the scene in which Paul (Marlon Brando) has anal sex with her character. “I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn’t tell her that there was that detail of the butter used as lubricant,” he said, arguing that he “wanted her reaction as a girl, not an actress”/ Schneider had been making this claim for years (she died in 2011) but it was only taken seriously when a 2013 interview surfaced in which Bertolucci confirmed it; the general refusal to accept those facts until they were ratified by a man adds a whole new layer of unpleasantness.
In the fall-out from the sexual harassment accusations against Harvey Weinstein, we have also become acquainted with the more unedifying side of Quentin Tarantino, who admitted that he carried on working with the producer even after hearing first-hand accounts of abuse. Then stories of his own dubious actions on the set of the Kill Bill films began to emerge. Uma Thurman accused the director of pressuring her to perform a dangerous driving stunt, which resulted in her being injured; when she asked to see footage of the accident at the time, Weinstein and Tarantino refused to release it, seemingly fearful of being sued. It also came to light that Tarantino spat in Thurman’s face for a scene in Kill Bill, and choked her with a chain in another, all in the service of dramatic authenticity. (Tarantino has said the choking “was Uma’s suggestion”.)
Just when he was in danger of coming across as an all-round sweetie-pie, a recording was made public of an interview with the DJ Howard Stern, in which Tarantino defended Roman Polanski’s crimes by saying that his victim was a “party girl” who “wanted to have it”. Once it became clear that the online clamour wasn’t going to die down, he issued an apology. In the light of this roll-call of dubious behaviour, it is hard not to approach with trepidation his forthcoming film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, about the Charles Manson-orchestrated murders in which Polanski’s then-wife, Sharon Tate, was killed along with their unborn child. It can only be hoped that the movie, starring Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, will display the sort of tact and sensitivity that Tarantino himself has been slow to exhibit.
A recent interview with Michael Haneke, in which he decried the #MeToo movement as a “witch- hunt” and an example of “man-hating puritanism”, ranks far lower than these other examples of male-oriented abuses of power. But the effect on how audiences receive the work is likely to be the same: Haneke’s off-screen remarks – incautious if we are being generous, wilfully ignorant if we are not – can’t help but reframe the way we look at his films. Now, he is no longer merely an exacting chronicler of middle-class guilt, as limited in empathy as his most recent film, Happy End, might suggest. His views on the gender disparity, and the sort of redress necessary to correct it, show him also to be poorly equipped to make any sort of social diagnosis not confined to the cinema screen.
In the race to offer the most insensitive comment on #MeToo, however, Terry Gilliam is now in the lead following his claim that some of the women who found themselves alone with Weinstein “knew what they were doing”. The actor Ellen Barkin, who auditioned for Gilliam’s film Brazil and appeared in his adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, responded by tweeting: “My hard won advice: never get into an elevator alone with terry gilliam [sic].” [Gilliam didn’t respond.]
It is plausible that our disillusionment with once-revered directors could hasten an end to the auteur worship that has dominated cinema since the 60s. In an age of popular activism, when none of us can claim we cannot see the connection between principles and actions, it may become harder to celebrate blindly the output of a director who derides #MeToo, or dismisses the fact that they have a company linked to an account in a tax haven, as Pedro Almodóvar , named in the Panama Papers along with his brother Agustín, has done. (His response? “My name and my brother’s name are some of the least important names in the Panama Papers. If it was a film, we wouldn’t even be extras.” Hardly the sort of penetrating insight that has made him a world-class dramatist.) Many of our film-making heroes will inevitably fall from grace. But does that mean auteur theory will go down with them?
Auteur is one of those words, like diva and masterpiece, that has been devalued to the point of redundancy. Prolonged misuse has resulted in a situation in which any director with an immediately recognisable style, or a recurring set of themes and concerns, is an auteur.
The word was never supposed to denote a star director. When the Cahiers du Cinéma critics, including such film-makers-in-waiting as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, used the label “auteur” under the influence of Bazin in the mid-50s, they were recognising directors whose ability to bring personality to movies that had not necessarily originated with them, and to make ambitious, expressive work within the limits of the studios, had gone unappreciated until that point – John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles among them. Most of those film-makers had enjoyed success, but the suggestion that their work might also have artistic merit came first from the auteurist critics.
There have been many reasons over the course of the past 70 years to dispute or disparage auteur theory. “Auteur theory just denigrates everyone else’s job,” said Fred Schepisi, the Australian director of Six Degrees of Separation and Roxanne. The British film-maker Alan Parker (Bugsy Malone, The Commitments) said it was “cooked up by a bunch of Frenchmen with an exercise book and a 16mm camera, perpetuated by the people who write about film, and fed by the insatiable vanities of us directors”. And although Sarris died in 2012, he lived long enough to witness the depreciation of ideas he had helped propagate. “Every director has to show his wild visual style in order to establish himself and blaze a trail immediately,” he lamented in 2005.
Now, though, the demise of auteurism may finally be upon us. The revelation that brilliant directors have a darker side, whether it’s Bertolucci’s bullying or Haneke’s intolerance, is nothing new. Like any cliche, the image of the tyrannical film-maker with riding crop, jodhpurs and loudhailer has survived in our cultural currency because it has a strong component of truth. But it is difficult to see how the unquestioning reverence of directors can continue in this new climate of hyperawareness, where the constant drip-feed of discrediting stories proves once and for all that time’s up.