A 9-film series of not-quite-classics (on 35mm), "Auteurs Gone Wild" runs at Anthology Film Archives from March 20-30, 2014; what follows are the director's cut of the program notes (with production stills of the auteurs themselves, mid-wild)—
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If the Hollywood auteurs were the ghosts in the studio machine, what would they look like exorcised? Rather than author, the word "auteur" might have referred to a kind of rhetorician working within genre codes that, once decoded, would only reveal his own commentary on them. But what would happen if this auteur cleared his throat, managed a sip of water, and tried speaking in his own tongue? Typically, the critics who had authored the auteur as a placeholder and retroactive justification for their own generic interpretations would have to snub such attempts to break out of genre molds to go strange, personal places. For the irony is that these works, kind of laboratory...
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If the Hollywood auteurs were the ghosts in the studio machine, what would they look like exorcised? Rather than author, the word "auteur" might have referred to a kind of rhetorician working within genre codes that, once decoded, would only reveal his own commentary on them. But what would happen if this auteur cleared his throat, managed a sip of water, and tried speaking in his own tongue? Typically, the critics who had authored the auteur as a placeholder and retroactive justification for their own generic interpretations would have to snub such attempts to break out of genre molds to go strange, personal places. For the irony is that these works, kind of laboratory...
- 3/21/2014
- by David Phelps
- MUBI
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