The role of the auteur

In imagining the above hypothetical production of evolving collections of soliloquies, it is hard to rationalise the exact role an auteur plays. On the face of it, the performance is created by the person who selects which of the soliloquies are used and which are to be replaced. Is this the work of a true auteur, or, the mechanical reactions to feedback from the audience (or customer in the case of an e-business solution)?

This is not such a mechanical selection process as it might appear because there has to be a judgement made and the making of such judgements is creative: and that is the function of the auteur. The selecting auteur will have to have an awareness of what is likely to be most interesting or entertaining for an audience. It necessitates being aware of what audiences like and applying the right combination of ideas and innovations to produce an appropriate mix. This is best explained by looking again at the role of the auteur in film making.

When Andrew Sarris wrote his article on the theory of auteurism in film making in 1992 , there were many critics of this theory. Chief amongst these critics was Pauline Kael who accused Sarris of a crude sort of Platonism: espousing theory that could not be applied in practice. She claimed that Sarris was trying to establish fixed concepts and objective standards to a media that was inherently ephemeral. Each film, she said, was an art form that could only be judged on a personal subjective level, involving taste and intellectual competence. As these were not scientifically definable, she said it made a nonsense of having standards whereby one film could be measured against another. She claimed that judgement on films could only be made on the basis of experience and emotional reaction and there was no place for any rationalisation of the elements that determined the quality of a film.

The weakness of Pauline Kael's argument is that there is no logical relationship between what a person says about a film and their competence to comment. In other words her view is lacking some form of criteria in judging which judgements are valid. This takes us back to chapter five where the work of Kruger and Dunning showed that incompetent people are likely to have totally erroneous views which they are quite positive about because they are unaware of their own lack of knowledge and capability of making judgements. Pauline Kael's arguments would make such views as equally valid as those of people who were competent and appropriately experienced to make judgements.

Pauline Kael was against using the qualities of the director as a basis for judging films because, as she argued, the input of a director wasn't necessarily the critical factor in determining the success of a film. She argued that if universality did not apply then the theory of a director as an auteur was not viable.

In 1971, she wrote a controversial essay entitled "Raising Kane", about Orson Welles' masterpiece film "Citizen Kane". In this essay she made the argument that the auteurism was not the work of Orson Welles but was a result of collective achievement. She claimed that rather than being an original work of genius the ideas were already developing in Hollywood at that time and the important contributions to the film by the scenarist Herman J. Mankiewicz and the cameraman Gregg Toland were being ignored.

To Pauline Kael, Welles was not a creative auteur at all, but, simply somebody who was good at bringing out the best in the people he worked with. Such a view fits in with the twentieth century concepts of production, which would see Orson Welles as a good manager and leader, rather than being the inspired creator.

This highlights the paradigm shift between a cooperative and a collaborative view point. From Pauline Kael's viewpoint, Orson Welles was the leader of a cooperative association of exceptionally skilled technicians, who together brought about the creation of an exceptional film. From Sarris's view point, Orson Welles was the source of the exceptional creative activity that produced "Citizen Kane", in collaboration with the appropriate technologists who he used to bring his vision to life.

There can be justification for both of these view points, but, they are both found wanting in a situation of continuous change, where the results are neither planned nor visualised but continuously evolve in response to changing audience expectations.