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Robert P. Kolker and David Wyatt, "The Film Auteur: Angles of Vision" (Routledge, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Pete Kunzee
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunzee. My guests today are Robert P. Kolker and David Wyatt, professors emeritus in the English department at the University of Maryland, College park, and the authors of the film Auteur Angles of Vision. The book was published by Rutledge in 2026. Good afternoon, Robert and David. Thank you for your time today.
- [00:28]
Robert P. Kolker
How are you doing? Great.
- [00:30]
David Wyatt
Good to be here.
- [00:30]
Robert P. Kolker
Yeah.
- [00:31]
Pete Kunzee
I'm glad we have a chance to talk about your book and the concept of the auteur, which is so persistent within film studies. Before we dive in, I was hoping you could both give a sense of. Give a sense to our listeners of your backgrounds and what brought you to working on film.
- [00:52]
Robert P. Kolker
I'm a renegade from literary studies and have been doing film for many, many years, Dave.
- [01:02]
David Wyatt
Oh, well, you should tell us more. Bob, talk a bit about what happened to you at Syracuse.
- [01:08]
Robert P. Kolker
Oh, the Syracuse story. Yes. I was studying my MA for my MA At Syracuse, and they did a. The. The campus theater did a cycle of Bunuel films, his Mexican films, and it was a revelation. I suddenly saw continuities from film to film. They even looked alike. The cinematography was the same, as well as the content. And that sort of began shifting my attention, which got permanently shifted a few years later when I was at Columbia and doing my PhD in 18th century literature and began getting more interested in film and made the switch ultimately.
- [02:07]
David Wyatt
Well, in my case, I've always loved movies. I was raised in Southern California, so I was near the glamour factories and went to college and went to all the film society showings. But I suppose the big turning point was I met and fell in love with a woman who owned an independent movie theater in Charlottesville, Virginia, Ann Paratti. And so I had access every week to these wonderful festivals she was running French, Italian, German films in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. Bob, in fact, came down one night and introduced Altman Shortcuts to a nice big audience. So I had this intimate contact with both running a theater as a business and also choosing and thinking about movies that my wife Ann, was showing. And then Bob came to me when he got this project from Rutledge and asked me if I'd like to come on board and said, sure, let's try it.
- [02:59]
Pete Kunzee
Yes, you're both retired, at least from the institutional life, but you remain active in writing and research. So I'm curious about learning more about this project and how it developed and why the auteur kind of piqued both of your interest when you know you could be writing other things or reading other things, and you're like, no, let's go back to this concept and talk about why it matters.
- [03:23]
Robert P. Kolker
So, yeah, it came to me during a quiet period between books, and it seemed something that Routledge would be interested in and something that I had been talking about directly and indirectly for years. And so I made a little pitch and they caught it. And as I began thinking more and more, I wanted another pair of eyes and another brain on it. And since, as Dave said, he's been in movies as an intelligent observer for many years, I thought maybe this would be the time for him to dive in and leave literature for a few months and talk about film. And he. I mean, the. The heart of the book is beating with both of us, but louder with David.
- [04:24]
David Wyatt
You know, the word auteur really is a synonym for author. And despite all the talk about the death of the author and literary theory, I've always believed in them, and I've written about authors as if they existed and as they. They composed their books and their careers. So it was a simple enough step for me to embrace the idea that the director matters. And I found encouragement for the belief when I came across a genre quote where says quote, there had to be someone who put the whole thing together. And this is by a man, by the way, who was one of the most cooperative and generous of directors. That is, he had his relatives working with him, but he was very kind to his cinematographers, his. His staff, his support staff. And so he. He understood that a lot of people put a movie together, but finally there had to be someone, as he says, who put the whole thing together.
- [05:19]
Pete Kunzee
And, Dave, if I can. If I can ask you to kind of articulate that a little bit more for those who may be uninitiated with Roland Bart, what is the. The argument behind this idea that authors are dead?
- [05:31]
David Wyatt
Well, the lay person, what happened was, you might say, in the 70s and 80s, we had the invasion of context. That's a word you hear a lot. Oh, please provide us a context for this work of art, this poem, this movie, this novel. And so in the effort to bring context into the study of literature, historical, biographical, industrial context, national context, the author sort of recedes as the central figure gaining attention. And instead we look at all the ways in which works of art are influenced by what happens around them as they're being made. And so I don't know much about. As much about film theory and studies as Bob does, but my sense is that film Studies was much taken with this idea and it began to talk about all kinds of things besides directors themselves.
- [06:29]
Pete Kunzee
Yeah, and Bob, if I can transition to you, maybe you want to offer us a working definition of auteur and the early days of this auteur era.
- [06:35]
Robert P. Kolker
The interesting thing about film and the history of film is that it was a self teaching art. The people who made it learned as they went along, and the viewers who watched it learned as they went along. And I think at this point we don't even need a definition of auteur. I was struck while reading about the unhappy death of Rob Reiner, how much the word hauteur simply appeared not in italics and without definition, without explanation. And I think people know that auteur means that the director is largely in charge of the production. Now, the problem is when dealing with the auteur in American film, from the very beginning, when the term was invented by the French and then imported or exported, rather here is that it is a necessary untruth, because American film, by and large, with few exceptions, is a collaborative art. But all of those young French filmmakers, to be watching American film, seeing that there was a continuity across the board, no matter who wrote the film, no matter what studio produced it, that there was something in the work of Samuel Fuller or Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock that pulled them together. And that's how the notion of the auteur for American cinema came to be born. I think it's a little different in the case of Renoir, for example, where he was the boss and in charge of everything. American film directors almost always had and still have, by and large, a boss, whether it be the studio or the producer, but it is still the director who puts the words into images and who directs the director of cinematography, where to put the camera, who directs the actors, how to deal with the camera, how to deal with the lines, how to deal with the scene. He or she may or may not be involved in the editing. Certainly in the history of Hollywood filming of studio filmmaking, the director had a relatively small, if any, role in the editing. Much to the sorrow of, say, Orson Welles. But still, I mean, even in Welles's case, where his films were taken and chopped and put, there's no question when you look at an image, a single image, a still image from the Welles film, who did it? Who made it?
- [09:45]
David Wyatt
There's a. I just read an article in the New Yorker about what happened to Welles's Magnificent Ambersons, his second film, which he produced. He then left town. I think he went to South America to work on Something else. And he left the. Left the film in the hands of the studio and they chopped it up down to it's 80 some minutes. And there's been this, this decades long hunt for the lost footage. And somebody is now trying to, using various scripts and leftover bits of information, trying to reconstruct the film using AI. And so this is an example of how a very dominant director lost control of the movie he'd so carefully made. And I think he says somewhere in this article that it was his greatest work.
- [10:33]
Robert P. Kolker
Work, yeah.
- [10:34]
Pete Kunzee
It's just fascinating to see how we kind of keep coming back to Welles and these certain directors as these visionaries. Right. Because core of to the auteur theory is this notion that all auteurs are directors, but not all directors are auteurs. And if I can ask one more question about the auteur theory before we kind of dig in more to the structure of the book. There's a line in the introduction where you write it is only a bit of a stretch to say that the auteur theory made serious film studies possible. And Bob, you mentioned that you were a renegade from English. As you know, some of those founding generations of film studies scholars often came from art history, came from English, came from history to kind of build the field. I'm curious if you could explain to listeners how auteur theory, both its proponents and its detractors, kind of made film studies coalesce. Is that a fair assessment?
- [11:27]
Robert P. Kolker
It's very simple. It gave film a proper name. It was able, we were able to say and talk about a Hitchcock film or a Wells film, just like in literature, you can talk about a Faulkner novel. It removed anonymity from film. They made it. Well, instead of they made. Was Nicholas Ray made it. That was all the difference.
- [11:58]
David Wyatt
And Andrew Sarris in 1968 writes his big book about his auteurs. And he arranges them into categories, into ranked categories. The Pantheon, the Far side of Paradise, Likely likable, and so on. And Sarris is teaching at Columbia. He's producing a lot of very brilliant students. And he kind of institutes the idea that not only do atturs exist and matter, but that you can rank them and that you can exclude or demote people from serious consideration while uplifting others. And this, we tried to avoid this to a certain extent, but on the other hand we had to make a list. We had to pick, I think it was some 54. We ended up with 54 directors that we felt we wanted to write about. And we say the representative they're not meant to be necessarily the best, although of course we admire them greatly. But I think Ceres is very important in this country in importing the theory and then giving it this kind of almost competitive edge.
- [13:00]
Pete Kunzee
Yeah. When I teach the auteur theory, I often teach Pauline Kael's essay, which of course is a pretty brutal affront to Sarris.
- [13:08]
Robert P. Kolker
Right.
- [13:09]
Pete Kunzee
But I mean, I think most good disciplines always have good debates in them. Right, sure.
- [13:13]
Robert P. Kolker
Pauline Kale is a nuisance.
- [13:16]
Pete Kunzee
She's a nuisance. But I think the she writes, she's an accessible, provocative tricks. So I think students really get a sense of how this conversation is developing in line with. After reading Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962. Right. Which is the preview essay for the book that you were talking about, David. Right, right, right. So let's. Let's talk about tackling the auteur. Right. Because it is this kind of foundational concept in the field. And I imagine Rutledge, when they approached you about the book, Bob was thinking about this being a classroom volume that could be brought to undergraduates who are cutting their teeth in film studies. So I'm curious how, when you both sat down to tackle it, you started to organize it, make your lists, but also kind of avoid that kind of pantheon because situation Aris, for better or worse. Right. Also says, you know, these guys aren't doing it. Right. And I think famously, like Billy Wilder, for instance, he kind of is like, no, but, you know, and obviously that has changed over time. That kind of thinking as good theory does. So. Short version of that question. How did you begin to tackle such a. An ambitious project as, you know, the film on tour? We.
- [14:32]
Robert P. Kolker
I think, first of all, we were hoping that this would reach a broader or wider audience than. Than simply students.
- [14:40]
Pete Kunzee
Sure.
- [14:43]
Robert P. Kolker
But as you said, the decision right away was not to do Sarris. He did it really well. It's a miraculous book. I mean, it was a book that he wrote without access to videotape in the 1960s. So we chose who we liked and who we thought would yield good ideas.
- [15:12]
David Wyatt
I think one of the things we could say is that for me, the book begins on the first page of our first chapter called Movement Auteurs. And the first sentence I would say is, in the ruins of Rome, the Nazis now fleeing from the outskirts of the city. Roberto Rossellini and so on. So we started with the post war. We start with 1945. Why start there? Why not begin with Eisenstein or with Griffith or even earlier? And so Bob starts writing this Chapter and the movements include, first of all Neorealism, then the New Wave, then the new German cinema, and then finally the Hollywood Renaissance. Why do we start here with the neo Neorealism, the new Wave, the new Hollywood, New German Hollywood cinema? I'm not sure I've ever answered the question sufficiently to myself, but Bob may want to say something about how it was that that's where he wanted to begin.
- [16:13]
Robert P. Kolker
I would say nothing more complicated than convenience, that that was the place to start, that that provided a way to open out, and then a little later to go a little further back. So in a later chapter, we talk about some of the older figures. But basically the notion was that this was a convenient place because this is where there's a kind of refresh that occurs in world cinema, starting with neorealism.
- [16:51]
David Wyatt
Well, and it's true. That's true enough. But I also think we ended up writing about largely second half of the century figures. And so your first book is about the Hollywood Renaissance, American filmmakers of the 60s and 70s. And my interest was kindled at that same time by what's so exciting about what's happening in American movies in. In that. In the 60s and 70s. And then we circle back, as you say, to forerunners, Griffith, Mernau, Eisenstein. But I think it's important that for us, we're both basically post war babies or, or Bob's a bit older, but we, we grew up in the middle of the century. So we're, in a sense, we're kind of trying to capture what was happening as we came into consciousness and awareness of movies. And this was sort of where it. It got, as you say, refreshed and rekindled by the neorealists and then on from there.
- [17:48]
Pete Kunzee
Yeah. And if I'm correct, the neorealists were not only lauded by the Caille. Right. Caille was very interested in what they were doing. But this is also the beginning of Cannes Film Festival. And this kind of growing notion of a world's art cinema tradition gets kind of galvanized in those moments. So I think it's an. It's an important place to kind of start a discussion of what's happening. And I guess also the post war context in Italy also allows for a kind of autourism in comparison to what we see in the highly organized structure of Hollywood that I believe Bob referred to earlier. Right. So, you know, institutionally, autourism becomes possible.
- [18:26]
Robert P. Kolker
The time that the French invented the word, it fit.
- [18:30]
Pete Kunzee
And it helped to legitimize the study of the American cinema. In the process, as you note as well. So let's talk a little bit about the neorealists and their place in this kind of book. And it's curious to think about how, say you mentioned De Siko's kind of pivot, but also kind of Rossellini and how his vision is kind of coming through, I guess, using those directors. What are the kinds of traits, qualities. I know criteria can be a loaded word here, but that start to kind of bear evidence that something more is happening here than, you know, your hired gun director who comes in, does the project they're hired to do and goes on to the next one. How do we delineate there?
- [19:18]
Robert P. Kolker
The word that comes to mind is immediacy, particularly in the case of Rossellini and Rome Open City. I mean, he was able to get a hold of the end reels of unexposed film from the American Signal Corps. And he took semi or non professional actors and took them and put them in the streets or went into their apartments. And there's a sense of things happening in ways that were for the most part certainly an American film quite unknown. And it started the movement out of doors to get the cameras out of the studio, into the world.
- [20:04]
David Wyatt
Yeah, there's a documentary feel to a lot of it. The camera in the streets, the black and white. But also, I think it is. It's not just that it's new, but it's about a whole culture that's died and has to be reborn. I mean, Italy was in ruins, literally. It had been on, quote, the wrong side of the war. And out of this terrible embarrassment, if you will, about the country's place in history, this amazing movement is born, which is taking account of the cost to that country, of the history it's just been through. And the French at the same time, the young French like Truffaut and Godard, watching American movies which are finally streaming into the country. And they're seeing that their country has won, but really lost in the sense that it's been humiliated by an early defeat. And Germany has been defeated too, as it needed to be. And America's been the great victor eventually. And out of all this you get an immense release of energy. And it's not just a technical shift, but it's a sense that the world is in some sense starting over. And I think our book carries a certain weight of awareness of that fact that this is all happening in the wake of some gigantic shift in world history.
- [21:28]
Pete Kunzee
And it moves internationally too. It was interesting to see Satyajit Ray Included in this. Right. Obviously, the great Indian director. Why is it important to kind of place him into this kind of tradition, that of these movement directors in Italian neorealism?
- [21:45]
Robert P. Kolker
Well, because neorealism swept the world. And when Ray Satyashit. Ray began his OPU trilogy, he began thinking about how neorealism worked. And these are, in fact, neorealist films. And he belonged. He fit in the movement that neorealism started.
- [22:13]
Pete Kunzee
And it's interesting to think, too, about these directors not only as part of movements, but also, obviously, a lot of the directors who work through the 50s, or begin after the 50s, have this concept of the auteur to kind of perhaps shape and guide their own kind of artistic practice. So I think it's really important that you included chapter two, where you point to these forerunners, right, These kind of auteurs, before the concept has been kind of articulated. Can you. Can you talk about the ways in which Murnau, Eisenstein, Griffith, exhibit kind of. I don't want to say proto auteurist tendencies, but are kind of inspiring. What later becomes this idea of the director as visionary director, as the artistic lead on the production?
- [23:07]
Robert P. Kolker
Well, if you think about Eisenstein, he did. He was the essential auteur. He did everything. He may have had script writers, he may have had Stalin breathing down his neck, but he fashioned everything himself. Every bit of film, every image, every movement is essential. Eisenstein. Same with Murnau. Murnau comes out of the expressionist movement and makes a series of extraordinary films that are marked by a style that is unmistakable, which is very much the definition of auteur. Unmistakable style. And then he comes to the US he's brought over by William Fox, and makes what many consider to be the greatest silent film, Sunrise.
- [24:13]
David Wyatt
And you can talk about the three of them very sort of in a condensed way, as each making signal contributions to film techniques. You know, Griffith, it's the close up, it's the cut that sort of tries to create continuity. And then you have Eisenstein on the opposite side, embracing montage. And then finally you have Murnau, who really is the great early champion of the moving camera. So you put all three of these figures together, and you have a bouquet of options for how to organize your film. I think we argue that montage didn't triumph in the great tradition. There are later figures who embrace it. But Star wars in some sense, is a work of montage. But these three people give us the kind of film grammar and a way to position and move the camera that then Everybody can draw upon.
- [25:10]
Robert P. Kolker
They are the three legs that film history builds on.
- [25:16]
Pete Kunzee
And, you know, in the next chapter, where you're thinking about. I'm sorry, not the next chapter, the fourth chapter where you're thinking about comedy. You know, we then get into this question of genre, right. Cause when we were talking about Rob Reiner earlier, I think one of the things that's interesting about him as an auteur is, you know, although he kind of stuck to comedy, right. He really did kind of move through different genres, particularly in the earlier part of his career. And, you know, of course, some auteurs are known for doing this ably, right. Hawks comes to mind. And then other auteurs, you know, kind of stay in a space and develop that. So in comedy, I think you had this interesting opportunity to think about Buster Keaton and Chaplin alongside Sturges, Wilder and Almodovar. So can you talk about genre and working within a genre and being an auteur while remaining, you know, maybe not solely, but, you know, perhaps primarily located in a certain kind of story formula in space?
- [26:19]
Robert P. Kolker
Well, we discovered early on that we were writing about genres, that it was inseparable from the concept of the director, that directors worked best and most comfortably in certain genres. And so a large part of the book is sort of over determined by the notion of genre.
- [26:44]
David Wyatt
I think with comedy, though, I wrestle with this particular genre more than I did say with the Western. Although in both cases, my attempt was to show how generic expectations and constraints are always being ironized or undermined in the hands of the best directors. They don't just uncritically embrace a given set of approaches to life, but they actually see through the genre in some sense. And one argument we make in the comedy chapter is that comedy is fundamentally not that funny, that it's full of tears, it's full of critique. Sturgis is. Is one of the great, shall we say, clinicians of American marriage. The lady Eve is all about.
- [27:30]
Robert P. Kolker
Men.
- [27:30]
David Wyatt
Being entrapped in a kind of idealized type that. That he projects on to the women he sees, in this case, to the same woman over and over without ever really seeing her at all. So I think my interest in genre is really to see all the ways in which it kind of outsmarts itself and in which, you know, the western hero, to take another example, is almost always being, in some sense knocked down, brought low precisely because he. To shift to another genre is what Jim Kaises calls a usurper. Whether it's John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, these figures are Often taking the law in their own hands. And the genre then has, to some sense, bring them low humiliate them or show their shadow reveal their shadow to us rather than simply upholding them as these looming heroes.
- [28:28]
Pete Kunzee
And I wanted to kind of pivot there into thinking about the Grandmasters chapter where you talk about Welles, Hitchcock and Kubrick. And I know, Bob, you talked a lot about Kubrick in your own work including Cinema of Loneliness which I remember reading when I was a graduate student in film studies. And I'm curious if we could talk about. I mean, I think no one would deny that these were auteur directors but to say that they were not only masters but grandmasters what leads you to that conclusion? And what value did you see in thinking about them alongside one another?
- [29:06]
Robert P. Kolker
Consistently profound and both visually and contextually. Films that were unmistakably theirs. Consistently theirs. And rich with material unlike almost any other filmmakers and terrific influences as well.
- [29:31]
David Wyatt
Well, that was really your chapter, Bob. And so I think. Tell us more about why the three together, how they worked off of each other in your mind as you're putting it together. I think at one point you thought about a book called Fire and Ice. Remember that title? Who was Fire and who was Ice?
- [29:52]
Robert P. Kolker
Wells is Fire and Kubrick was Ice. But I've sort of changed my mind about Kubrick. And he's less cold than is led to believe and far more emotionally rich than people usually recognize. I would say that Kubrick has the most imaginative, concentrated, intellectually rich films of the three. Hitchcock is the sort of mathematician of cinema. Everything is calculated to the last move, nothing out of place. I mean, Hitchcock famously said that he didn't have to look through the viewfinder while the film was being made because everything was predetermined and all they had to do is follow directions. And even the films themselves are full of kind of equations and rhythms and rhymes. In the case of Welles, there's just a grandeur there, a sense of embracing the world cinematically moving the camera in ways that, for me at least, gives me goosebumps. I mean, there's just a way of simply zeroing in with the slightest movement of the camera that reveals everything that he has to say whether it's in Citizen Kane, his first film or the Trial, his Kafka adaptation, one of his later films full of this kind of richness of seeing that is not equaled, I think, in any other filmmaker.
- [31:50]
David Wyatt
But you also, with Welles, had a pretty strong case to make about his.
- [31:54]
Robert P. Kolker
Development, the later Wells because Wells has got the sort of Perpetual historical, slightly hysterical global myth that here was the man who as a young man started at the top and then went downhill, which there is no evidence for. His later films, the Trial and Chimes at Midnight are better than Citizen Kane. They're better because they look better, they are more, they're richer, they're the work of a mature mind. Caine is fine. Caine is a young man's film full of energy and trying things out. Chimes at Midnight is a great autumnal work and there's nothing like it. There are no Shakespearean adaptations as good as Chimes at Midnight and no one, I think, who captures on film Shakespearean rhythms the way Welles does. In that film. The arc is upward, not downward, it's downward. If you look at his career as a money making filmmaker, none of the films made money. Almost all of the films until the very end were taken away from him and beat up in some way or another. But that's another arc which is different from the arc of the films which is up.
- [33:37]
David Wyatt
You also make the point in the pages about Chimes at Midnight, which is basically a movie about Falstaff, the Henry plays, that Wells is also returning to his early great theme, which maybe always his theme, which is nostalgia, male nostalgia. And, and Amberson's is one of the most nostalgic movies ever made. You know, it wants to go back to a kind of pre automobile world. There's a lot of nostalgia in Cain in the sense that you're searching back to the moment when he, the boy, fell into loss. And so as he's developing and changing and growing in your, in your reading, he's also returning to his earliest feelings about life and experience, which is there's always something back there that you're hearkening toward and you never can quite get there. And you know, what does Rosebud finally mean, right?
- [34:30]
Robert P. Kolker
It means, well, it means in the film that it is something to pin the film on. It's the perfect MacGuffin for Wells. It's a lost world. Wells is always thinking about the lost world and you want to get into psychoanalyzing him. His childhood was a very disrupted childhood. He was always traveling around with his father. He had genius pinned on him at a very early age. He never really had a childhood and allowed to grow up in a normal haphazard way. Also, I think he looks at cinema as a kind of mirror on the past. Even though he is fully engaged in what he can do now with the camera, what happens with what he does with the camera is somehow about a World lost, or in the case of a trial, a world coming apart. It seems. So there is throughout the career. I mean, even if you go to the middle period, if you look at Mr. Arkadin, if you look at Touch of Evil, his great film on his brief return to the US It's a kind of rough, hewn, melancholy about a world that is ugly but still vibrant in a kind of corrupt way. I think that's a nice idea for Touch of Evil, sort of vibrant corruption and, you know, the last words. Marlene Dietrich's last words. You know what? He was some kind of man. What else is there to say about someone? A wistfulness in the midst of this ugliness that Wells creates in this film. His character, Hank Quindlen, dies in a canal and a sewer. And yet he was some kind of man.
- [36:54]
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- [36:58]
Robert P. Kolker
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- [36:59]
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- [37:23]
Pete Kunzee
Yeah, I was struck in that chapter about how you make a point that I suppose we should think of Citizen Kane almost like a masterpiece in the traditional sense, right. Where one proves that they have mastered the craft, but is not necessarily the magnum opus or the best film they've done. I believe you made a point where you suggest that in some ways the form overwhelms the content in Citizen Kane. But I appreciated the love for Chimes at Midnight, which is a film that still haunts me from my first watching, particularly his performance. Right. So to not only be this great auteur, but to execute this. This beautiful pathos in his performance of Falstaff, I think he more he gets forming content perhaps. You know, and obviously this is always personal, but for me, forming content work a lot better in that film than even in Citizen Kane. But I. I think that's a little bit of a heretic claim since we. We have to teach Citizen Kane in film studies by default. I'm wondering if we can continue on that thread. Right. Because my question about comedy kind of prompts one to think about auteurism in terms of content. But with so much of our understanding of auteurism is control of form regardless of genre. Right. Especially for those great auteurs who moved so ably between them. Can you talk more about either of you? How you know, auteurism is also an appreciation of technique in addition to theme, in addition to narrative. And maybe a director who comes to mind is someone who, regardless of the genre they're working in, was. Was such a. An able craftsperson.
- [39:00]
David Wyatt
Well, I guess I could talk a bit about Ozu, who is a supreme formalist. And yet there's such deep emotion being contained and released by the forms. I mean, Ozu shoots his films from the position of a seated Japanese. The camera is about 3ft off the floor. You have all these horizontals and verticals based upon the interiors of Japanese, traditional Japanese homes. You have charged but seemingly contained conversations, usually within families, often about a marriage plot. The movies tend to be about trying to get someone married. Oftentimes Setsukohara, who's getting married late, the word late seems to occur again in the Danu Nozu. She's waited too long. And the way that parents have to conspire, she becomes a conspiring parent herself. And later Ozu films to conspire to get the daughters married off. So there's this kind of core plot and there's all this kind of composure and suppressed emotion, but you can feel the back pressure against these sort of generally fairly choreographed movements. All this longing and desire that's not being allowed to be expressed. And I also, in rewatching these movies, and I was focusing mostly on Setsuko Hara and the Japanese smile. Her face, which is. Has this radiant smile, but within it there's such a deep sadness that even as she's smiling and this kind of struck me that how many of these actors are smiling as they're saying the most astonishing and sometimes terrible things. There's a kind of strange candor that is being practiced by these characters. These actors, even as you know, they're trying to contain themselves. And so you get this sense that something is seeking release. And I think what happens in Osu is that it's all about the mockery of the patriarchs. It's all about. As much as he upholds the unit of the family, he sees that it's no longer working very well in terms of satisfying human desire. And increasingly the male figures in these movies become slightly ridiculous. And the women, mothers and daughters have to sort of take control of their own lives in ways that they hadn't been allowed to do heretofore.
- [41:32]
Pete Kunzee
Yeah, I think of Hara's final scenes in Tokyo Story, right, where she's talking with her sister in law and then talking to her father in law. And on the one hand she's kind of accepting the sadness of life, but on the other hand she's kind of being told like, you have to move on from the grief over our brother slash son. And it's devastating. And yet there is a sign, kind of a smile through it until she kind of finally breaks down. Right? I mean, kind of going back to. Is it Paul Schrader who makes that argument about the transcendental and Ozu? But it's. It's a devastating moment that speaks well to how performance and form are operating in Ozu's work. Right.
- [42:13]
David Wyatt
And the characters end up jisoo Ru. They end up, in one word, lonely. You're going to be lonely, someone says to the parent who just married off the daughter. And the loneliness of these characters, even when they're together in the same room, is so profound. And part of it's just about this set of conventions this culture has invented in order to contain the violence that you see, for instance, in Kurosawa's samurai movies. These are both post war directors again, and they're both dealing with post war Japan and the price it's had to pay and is still paying for its conduct in the war. And I see them both as sort of taking very different approaches to how this country's going to recompose itself and whether it can ever escape from what's been imposed upon it, which is a kind of American presence that's beginning to invade both how they dress, how they speak, the spaces in which they live.
- [43:17]
Pete Kunzee
And that discussion had us thinking about the auteur outside of the Hollywood space and outside of European art cinema. And thinking you have a great chapter here about Japanese auteurs. I'm wondering if we can also talk about the chapter on women auteurs and the female gaze. And you know what came to being. Thinking about Dorothy Arsner, a figure in the classical Hollywood era, alongside Jane Campion, right. Who is a New Zealander, I believe, and alongside Holland and Lupino. When we put these directors alongside each other, how does. How does gender kind of shape the way we think about the artist's craft?
- [44:03]
David Wyatt
Bob, you want to start with Arzner.
- [44:06]
Robert P. Kolker
It's sort of the eternal question, does a woman filmmaker present the world from a woman's point of view? Can you spot in the film that this film was made by a woman? And there are moments in Ochsner, certainly Dance Girl Dance, her most famous film, in which there are moments. There's that incredible moment when one of the Characters, faces the audience of men who are ogling her on stage and dresses them down. But she also made films about strong women who destroy themselves because of their character or because of the mores of the time. Lupino, I think, is a different story. I think in Lupino's work, you can see the hand of a woman. Even a film like the Hitchhiker, which has got three male characters, the men are weak, they're at the mercy of a lunatic. They don't know what to do. And I think there's a kind of sensibility. But I want to talk about something a little. Draw back a little bit because there's something interesting happening. Women are not faring much better in Hollywood film than in the past few years. I mean, there was a brief upsurge in the 70s and 80s, but where the women filmmakers are now are on television, on streaming shows and on network shows. Women writers, women directors, an amazing number of them. And you can begin to see a difference here and there. So I would urge people to look at the credits on television and see how many women are really being given a chance to work and what that work is and whether it's different from a male director in theatrical film. I'm not so sure.
- [46:34]
David Wyatt
We call that chapter a female gaze, not the female gaze.
- [46:38]
Robert P. Kolker
Right.
- [46:38]
David Wyatt
We all. We all know about the male gaze, but we didn't want to assert that there was a female gaze so much as ask a question, can there be one? Given the sort of the power of the history of movies and. And the nature of the industry, and where would it come from? What would it look like? And I don't think we ever quite answered the question. We raised it, perhaps. I guess for me, the. The one moment I would focus on is the bigamist La Pinos, the bigamist where Edmund o' Brien has been married to two women, Joan Fontaine and Lupino herself, and each of whom seems to love him, if you can put it that way. He goes on trial, he's in the courtroom, he's been convicted of bigamy. And at the end, both women look at each other as he's walking out. Look at him. They exchange gazes, if you will. The biggest male with the two women that still seem to care for him. And the look that Joan Fontaine gives Lupino has by now left the courtroom, is full of empathy and compassion and pity. Not rage, not anger. As if she understands how the culture has brought them all to this pass, that the nature of his work, he's living in two cities, the Nature of her infertility, the availability of Lapino, her loneliness. All of this creates, at the end, an exchange of gazes that is sort of critical and yet also compassionate. The gazes express all the failures of the culture to make relations between men and women more congenial.
- [48:18]
Pete Kunzee
So as we head into the home stretch, I think I have perhaps my biggest question for you both which is kind of two questions. So you can either answer 1 or 2 answer both. And I'm curious what you both discovered in the process of writing this book about how you think and feel about auteurs and film and. Or how do you feel like the auteur remains so crucial to our understanding and appreciation of cinema as an art form?
- [48:47]
Robert P. Kolker
I was sort of reaffirmed in my belief in the power of the director and my appreciation for their films grew as I wrote about them. As I have been writing about them. The sense of my intimacy with their work has sort of grown. And it was a pleasure. It was an intellectual pleasure and an emotional pleasure.
- [49:22]
David Wyatt
I would answer the question by quoting something that we quote from Wells where he says something like, all of my films begin with the word. We haven't talked much about scripts, about what is said in these films but we do a lot of that in this book. We do a lot of quoting from scripts. We talk about, for instance, David Mamet's script for the Verdict and how it was altered by Lumet in the process of making the film. And I would say that I came to feel, yes, of course, film was all about images, shots, scenes, of course. But I also came to believe that the auteur theory needs to take as much account as it can of dialogue, of what's being said and how a lot of these great auteurs were also their own script writers. And whether they were or not, they take the words that they've written or been given and they matter just as much as any other element in the film. So that was something that I had not anticipated coming to feel, but I did.
- [50:31]
Pete Kunzee
And so what are you working on now? Are you continuing to research and write new projects? Are you taking a breath after finishing this one? Are you enjoying retirement?
- [50:41]
Robert P. Kolker
Hopefully taking a breath, sleeping Kubrick, thinking about other things.
- [50:48]
David Wyatt
I'm actually working on a little book about falling in love with authors sort of similar to extension of this project. Who were the writers that I came across as I began to study literature in college and thereafter that mattered to me? And when was the moment in which I was struck by their genius? And then how did my relationship with them play out over 50 years of writing and teaching about them.
- [51:14]
Pete Kunzee
Yeah. It does seem that there's a certain love affair between those we teach and study and ourselves, isn't there?
- [51:21]
David Wyatt
I don't know any other way to go at it.
- [51:24]
Robert P. Kolker
Right, right.
- [51:25]
Pete Kunzee
I think of that Helen Vendler essay from the 80s where she's, you know, they will love what we have loved. Right. And kind of bringing that cinephilia or bibliophilia into the classroom.
- [51:35]
David Wyatt
Well, that's what Wordsworth says. Others will love what we have loved and we will teach them how.
- [51:43]
Pete Kunzee
It's a great place for us to end. Thank you both for your time today. Bob and Dave, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. The book is the film Angles of Vision, available now from Rutledge and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze and this has been new Books and film on the New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [52:01]
Robert P. Kolker
Sa.