Herzog, Martel, and Auteurism

Abstract

Auteurism has followed a long and winding path since its birth in the 1940s and ascendency in the 1960s, moving from the illustrious pages of Cahiers du cin ema to sundry high-toned publications, scholarly conferences, and university classrooms, and thence to movie reviews and fan discourses of all sorts. Along the way, it has been debated by such spirited thinkers as the zealously supportive Andrew Sarris and the belligerently unsupportive Pauline Kael, and eventually some of its French originators started cooling on their own invention, as when no less a polemicist than Jean-Luc Godard acknowledged that he and his colleagues had exaggerated the primacy of directors in the enormously collaborative enterprise of feature filmmaking. Its many ups and downs notwithstanding, however, the politique des auteurs still thrives as it approaches its eightieth anniversary, and one sign of its ongoing vigor is the prevalence of book series with auteurist foundations, from Wallflower Press’s Directors’ Cuts and University Press of Mississippi’s Conversations with Filmmakers to the British Film Institute’s World Directors and University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Film Directors, a highly prolific line with more than fifty books published to date. I have reviewed several volumes in the Illinois series elsewhere, and its most recent additions are excellent enough to warrant special attention. The new entries are Werner Herzog, by Joshua Lund, a professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame, and Lucrecia Martel, by Gerd Gem€ unden, a professor of German, comparative literature, and film and media studies at Dartmouth College. Herzog and Martel are very different figures. The former is a Western European man who has directed scores of features and shorts in a long list of countries during a career spanning almost sixty years, gliding easily between fiction and documentary. The latter is a South American woman whose two dozen directorial credits include only four features, each brilliant enough to confirm her status as a world-class auteur. But both have distinctive and resolutely personal styles that weave their major works into the kind of esthetic whole that auteurism can effectively analyze and explicate. The new Illinois volumes are therefore more than welcome.