Collaboration

FROM AUTEURS TO AMATEURS

In the late twentieth century, traditional concepts and practices in the collaborative nature of filmmaking began to be challenged. On the one hand, the proliferation of camcorder and digital technologies has taken filmmaking out of the studio and away from its cadres of artists and craftspeople, placing the whole endeavor in the hands of amateurs. As if to fulfill the prophecy of Alexandre Astruc's 1946 theoretical formulation of the caméra-stylo , or "camera pen," even the most unpracticed among them can now capture image and sound with mobility and ease, working in relative solitude, relieved of the need for sound engineers, camera operators, focus pullers, editors, special effects technicians, and most of the rest of the elaborate apparatus of the film studio (Astruc in Graham). First-time filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (b. 1968), for example, made El Mariachi (1992) for a comparative pittance and with minimal dependence on a technical crew. At first glance, such a film and such wide-open filmmaking possibilities seem to bear out the auteur theory, which grew out of Astruc's pronouncements and subsequent writings by Bazin in Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, and which was imported to the United States in the early 1960s by the critic Andrew Sarris (b. 1928). Over time, the auteurist position that the director is the prime creative force has been counter-manded by assertions that the true auteur is, variously, the writer, screenwriter, producer, editor, or cameraman. All of which proves, ironically, that not just one but all the participants in the filmmaking process deserve a measure of responsibility for the final product.

Filmmakers from the Danish movement known as Dogma 95 have in fact affirmed the primacy not of the director or any other individual but of the collaborative. The first Dogma Manifesto, delivered by Lars von Trier (b. 1956) in 1995, proclaimed that no credit for "Director" would be permitted on their films. Their movies were the result of partnership and interchange among cast and crew. The semi-improvised, location-shot films of the period from 1995 to 2000, including Festen ( The Celebration , Thomas Vinterberg, 1998), Mifunes sidste sang ( Mifune , Søren Kragh-Jacobson, 1999), Idioterne ( The Idiots , Lars von Trier, 1998), and The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, 2000), stand as testaments to Dogma's collective ideals.

After a century of cinema, the Dogma collective seems to have turned the wheel of film history full circle. The idea of abolishing the identity of the director hark back to the days of the silents, when viewers were kept guessing about the identities of the personnel behind and on the screen. Viewers of The Great Train Robbery in 1903, for example, were not told (and perhaps did not care to know) the identities of its director, players, and cinematographer. This film became famous for what it was, not for who was in it or who made it. The idea that individual authorship should be subordinated to the work has a long and vibrant history. In Elizabethan theater, as performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men or at London's Royal Court Theatre, the play was the thing (according to no less an authority than Shakespeare). The primacy of the work itself was also a hallmark of the ensembles of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold's Moscow Art Theatre and of Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. Like the theater, cinema is an arena for both individual and collaborative genius.