About midway through her rebuttal to Andrew Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Pauline Kael articulates the gripe I’d already scribbled in the margins of my textbook: “auteur critics tend to downgrade writer-directors—who are in the best position to use the film medium for personal expression” (18). Here, Kael is responding to Sarris’s claim that “a director is forced to express his personality through the visual treatment of material rather than through the literary content of the material” (516)[i], basically dismissing the screenwriter and script as hurdles an auteur must overcome or somehow manipulate to achieve his[ii] overall artistic vision.

Kael’s not having any of Sarris’s nonsense—and neither am I. Perhaps it’s because I’m a fiction-writer myself—a sucker for language, and a believer in what Kael calls “unified…expression” (24), where form and content are inextricably linked, and seemingly the product of a single creative mind—but my favorite movies almost unanimously come from writer-directors: Annie Hall (Woody Allen), Broadcast News (James L. Brooks), Say Anything (Cameron Crowe). My favorite films of the ones we’ve watched so far in class—4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days and Lost in Translation—are also the brain-children of writer-directors (Cristin Mungiu and Sofia Coppola, respectively). A popular habit of late is to call prestige television “novelistic,” but this is largely in reference to TV’s scope and serialized nature; to me, though, filmmakers like Mungiu and Coppola are the greater “literary” artists, on-par with the finest short-story writers.[iii] Such writer-directors are able to compress the whole of human experience into a package digestible in a single sitting; they are craftsmen who have perfected the art of personal expression on the level of spoken language (dialogue, story) and filmic language (mise-en-scène).[iv]

Of course, I can’t speak for Mungiu and Coppola as auteurs, since I’m not familiar with the whole of their oeuvres. Kael sees the auteur theory’s critical emphasis on a director’s holistic body of work as a way to avoid grappling with that director’s lesser films—hand-waving his missteps as the product of a bad script that the auteur is still somehow able to salvage by his “personality,” his “familiar touches” (15). She seems to prefer taking movies on a case-by-case basis, rejecting the notion that a particular director’s name on a film will make or break its success: “we judge the man from his films and learn to predict a little about his next films,” says Kael, “but we don’t judge the films from the man” (23).

Enter Peter Wollen and “The Auteur Theory”—a treatise that does not directly reference Kael’s piece, but demonstrates the flaws she perceives in the auteur theory to an almost-comedic ‘T.’ Wollen takes as one of his subjects John Ford, arguing that the director “finds transcendent values in the historic vocation of America as a nation….[and also] begins to question the movement of American history itself” (521). Wollen clearly wishes to situate the director as one of the ur-auteurs[v] (Sarris also evinces a fondness for Ford, including him on his “list of auteurs” on p. 517), but is only able to do so by examining “the whole corpus[,] which permits the moment of synthesis when the critic returns to the individual film” (529).

Herein lies my (and, ultimately, Kael’s) biggest problem with the auteur theory: It can only be applied retrospectively, once a director has amassed a significant body of work—and suggests that the critical vocabulary available to a film critic is limited by how many of a particular director’s films he or she has seen. In other words, you are not qualified to discuss one film by a director if you have not seen all films by that director. For example, the only Ford film I’ve ever seen is Stagecoach—and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite its problematic aspects, because it had interesting characters with surprising arcs (particularly Doc Boone, who heroically achieves sobriety to deliver Lucy’s baby before promptly falling off the wagon[vi]—thus suggesting that a person can be both good and flawed, capable of great accomplishments and great blunders both). In class last week, we claimed that Doc Boone, Dallas, and Ringo—a drunk, a prostitute, and an outlaw—are situated as heroes in the film, a subversive act on Ford’s part in Production Code-era Hollywood; perhaps this feeds into Wollen’s conception of Ford as a rewriter of American history, but more likely it is an example of a director kowtowing to what Kael calls “a system of production that places a hammerlock on American directors” (23). In any event, such a reading of the film would not pass snuff with Wollen, because it contextualizes the individual film in the sociopolitical climate of 1930s Hollywood as opposed to placing it on a chronology of Ford’s other films and comparing and contrasting it with those.

The auteur theory renders impossible contemporaneous film reviewing, and in that way is antithetical to Kael’s (and my) conception of art criticism: for “the critic to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others” (21). Kael says that, in criticism, “you must use everything you are and everything you know that is relevant” (21); Wollen, though, takes exception to the claim that “the mark of a good film is that it conveys a rich meaning, an important truth, in a way which can be grasped immediately” (533). Kael sees film criticism as equal parts heart and head, while Wollen views it as a systematic, cerebral task. And perhaps, ultimately, both types of criticism are valuable—but Kael’s version is certainly more artful.

[i] Let it be known that I am using the fifth edition of Film Theory and Criticism, meaning my page numbers (let alone my critical musings themselves) will be of little use to anyone else. So it goes.

[ii] And it is, without a doubt, almost always a “his.” Some of this is surely the result of when Sarris, Kael, and Wollen were writing, but female filmmakers are not referenced in any of the three articles. Perhaps auteur status is inherently male, which contributes to its flawed nature; Kael dances around this idea when she takes issue with Sarris’s notion of the “essentially feminine” and says that “it is amusing that a critic can both support these clichés of the male world and be so happy when they are violated” (13). Here, she attacks the logical fallacy rather than the gender bias, but still draws our attention to the tendency of a Sarris-style auteur to co-opt female-coded behaviors and experiences without actually telling women’s stories on-screen. In any case, I choose to read barely-contained feminist rage in some of Kael’s more pointed strikes against Sarris—and (spoiler alert) would reject the auteur theory myself for its de-emphasis on the role of the screenwriter and the role of female filmmakers both.

[iii] Kael amusingly notes that an auteur critic would dismiss Dostoyevsky’s work for demonstrating “incredible unity of personality and material” (14), which is a no-no for Sarris, who champions “the tension between a director’s personality and his material” (516).

[iv] Later, Kael expressly says “that mise-en-scène and subject material—form and content—can be judged separately only in bad movies or trivial ones” (24), implying that the auteur theorist’s tendency to evaluate films solely for their visual elements while ignoring their stories, characters, and dialogue is an implicit recognition that the films themselves are not unified works of art (in the way a novel might be, for instance).

[v] To mix the Germanic with the Latinate, just a smidge.

[vi] Pun intended, of course.

The scene in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days where Otilia discovers Gabita’s aborted fetus (1:38:23 to 1:39:07) is, in the basest sense, the moment to which the whole film has been building—the pay-off, as it were, grotesque though it may be. Here, the camera is positioned in such a way that it assumes our role as spectator; the tableau presented—a frontal image of the fetus itself, curled in a blood-stained white towel on the bathroom floor—is the centerpiece of the shot, even as Otilia busies herself with the task of wrapping it up and placing it in her purse.

This section interests me for a few reasons, but in particular it’s a useful shot to examine through Braudy’s theory of “open” and “closed” cinema. I will admit to having some difficulty distinguishing between these two proposed “types”—though Braudy himself spares me some embarrassment when he says that open and closed films “are…often in practice intertwined” (44). To me, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days feels in some ways open, for “[t]he objects and characters in the film existed before the camera focused on them and will exist after the film is over” (46-7); this is emphasized by the chyron at the start informing us we are in 1987 Romania—reminding us explicitly of both a “then” and a “now,” an inside world and an outside world—and the abrupt way in which the film ends with Otilia and Gabita in the middle of an unappetizing meal, highlighting what Braudy might call the characters’ failure to “[escape] the conflicts that [the film] has helped to articulate” (50).

But, ultimately, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days feels like a closed film. The camerawork, especially as the film nears its end—with Otilia running through the nighttime streets, the camera jostling in time with her panicked footsteps in what Braudy might call a Lang-like move—seems designed to promote “a claustrophobic identification of our point of view with that of the character” (48). The aforementioned bathroom scene is similarly claustrophobic, but even more than this sense of confinement, I am interested in Braudy’s concept of “[v]oyeurism…[as] the proper mixture of freedom and compulsion: free[dom] to see something dangerous and forbidden, conscious that one wants to see and cannot look away” (49).

Braudy associates closed cinema strongly with Hitchcock, and consequently—albeit, perhaps unintentionally—with the horror and suspense genres. The shot of Gabita’s aborted fetus—though presented by the camera matter-of-factly, and without any dramatic musical sting typical of a Hitchcock-style film—is arguably the single most explicit image in the movie. I hesitate to call it a gross-out image, as Mungiu’s intentions never feel exploitative or even particularly lurid, but suffice it to say that seeing a bloodied fetus is not entirely dissimilar from witnessing the bodily horrors that befall a character in, say, a Cronenberg movie.

As I said at the start, this bloodied fetus is also a foregone conclusion: Gabita is told earlier to go to the bathroom when she feels the fetus dislodging, and its disposal is essential to the success of the women’s plan. We know, even if only dimly, that the abortion will have to reach its logical end; what we don’t know, until that moment in the bathroom, is how complicit the filmmaker, the camera itself, will make us in the proceedings—and such “implicat[ion]” of the viewer is essential to Braudy’s definition of closed filmmaking (50).

Mungiu spares us, at first, from the actual discovery, providing instead a medium shot of Otilia in the bathroom doorway, looking in on what we can only assume is the fetus. The camera then moves to its spectator position, the fourth-wall facing out of the bathroom; however, it stays in Otilia’s line of sight. It is not until Otilia rises and leaves the doorway that the camera pans down to show the fetus itself—leaving us, the viewers, as the only ones present in this moment. I think here that Mungiu means neither to castigate us for viewing this image or abiding the abortion itself, nor to appall us with the undeniably humanoid features of a second-trimester fetus; in other words, the film does not seem to want us to make a moral judgment about when life begins or whether the Romanian government is right to have criminalized abortion.

Rather, because we have been asked to identify so strongly with Otilia throughout the film—indeed, Mungiu seems more interested in the emotional toll of loyal friendship on Otilia than that of terminating a pregnancy on Gabita—in this moment we are meant to feel what she feels: horror, disgust, a sort of reckoning with the reality of the situation she’s found herself in. We are implicated in the events, per Braudy’s definition, but we are not asked to sympathize with the fetus. For important sociopolitical reasons outside the realm of this particular analysis, not to mention the film itself—that is, the distinctly American, evangelistic tendency to personify aborted fetuses—I hesitate to compare the fetus in this instance to, for example, the dead body in a horror movie; however, in the latter instance it is surely typical to feel both shock and sorrow at the loss of life.

And while there is something inherently shocking about the sight of an aborted fetus wrapped in a dirty towel in a cramped hotel bathroom—the incongruity between the medical and the domestic is surprising—the sorrow we are meant to feel at this moment in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is for Otilia. This is reinforced by the camera’s emphasis on Otilia’s hands as she covers the fetus, the rushed improvisation of emptying her purse to create a vessel to transport it; we do not see her face again until the fetus has been placed inside the purse—until the immediate cause of her anguish is once again out of sight, if not out of mind. Also given emphasis in this moment are Otilia’s rapid, shallow breaths—an intimate detail, perhaps more telling than her facial expression itself (which we see earlier in the scene, before the initial reveal of the fetus).

The moment is tactile, visceral—an entrée for us as viewers into Otilia’s physical and emotional reality—and entirely in-keeping with Braudy’s belief that closed cinema “teaches us about ourselves” (50) through the example set by the characters upon whom the director focuses his or her attention. Mungiu’s focal point, both figuratively and oftentimes literally, is Otilia: even in a scene like this one, where she is located in the physical background of the shot, she remains always in the emotional foreground.