Retro...reply!

Rekha,

Thanks for kicking off the grand retrospective. This is a great idea, not just because I enjoy being self-congratulatory and having an excuse to talk about myself and my "work", but also because this is the time in the semester (you remember semesters, right?) when I get very narrow, very purpose-driven, and can't see the metaphorical forest for the metaphorical trees. It's a nice opportunity to broaden my view and bit and think about what this space has done and has the potential to do in the future. But first, to the past.

I think that the blogging we've done here and the conversations that our blogging has provoked have really forced me to consider who the "author" of a film really is. I see this question as tightly linked to your question of "what a film a film is doing"--you're really interested in the way the film is operating within culture, and I'm sort of focusing on the agent(s) responsible for the production of the film. Which is not to say I have any desire to get bogged down in the disputed territory of authorial intention, but just that so often in film the creative origin falls along a spectrum ranging from incredibly diffuse to a singular vision. Looking at where a particular film falls along that spectrum, and why, is fascinating to me.

We had a discussion in the film class last year about the MLA convention of citing the director as the author of a film, and it really opened a whole wide realm of questions for me as to who is responsible for what in the creation of a film. This discussion, of course, needs to be situated within particular production systems (Hollywood), genres, and the discrete filmmakers themselves, but still think it's worth discussion. For example, there was the high-tension dispute over the title of "auteur" between the creative forces behind Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. Both men, in my estimation, have a huge claims for their responsibility in the quality of these films, yet somehow the egotastic notion of the Enlightenment individual gets in the way of calling collaboration what it is. It's collaboration. Which isn't to say that some filmmakers aren't digging collaborating--there are certainly some doing that like crazy: just look at the interminable list of producers and directors for Little Miss Sunshine. But maybe that's just a different kind of film.

Then there are the Altmans, the Almodovars, and the Lynches who I genuinely believe execute a singular vision. Yes, they have help. Yes, there are cinematographers, ADs, and script advisers who certainly have creative influence. But if we're talking about vision, foresight, or innovation, there really are some filmmakers--properly not called directors, since I believe that director is actually a quite limited job--who genuinely conceive and execute films that are entirely their own.

I don't have a point, really. Just, I guess, that I don't value one type of filmmaking or filmmaker over another, but I'm fascinated by the ways we've examined who does what when making film.