Showing papers by "Wayne C. Booth published in 2002"

Is There an "Implied" Author in Every Film?

Abstract: Since this is only the second time I've ever tried to do film criticism, I decided that I must read up on it. And as I read painstakingly, page by page, through all seven hundred and thirty books on my library's list, I was a bit discouraged to find five books that actually had exhausted everything I could conceivably say: Henri Agel's Poetique du cinema: Man feste essentialiste, Guido Aristarco's II dissolvemento della ragione: discorso sul cenema, Francisco Ayala's El escritor y el cine, and one without an author: Verband der Film-and Fernseharbeitsgemeinschaften an den Deutschen Hochschulen. (Actually the one that came closest to my dubious level of understanding was Edgar Dale's Manual of Motion Picture Criticism Prepared for High School Students.) Leaving aside my ignorance of cinema studies (and most foreign languages), what about the implied author in literature? Any account of modern quarrels among literary critics about what the word "author" means could fill scores of books. In The Rhetoric of Fiction I concluded-it now seems to me a bit pompously-that the author makes his readers (of course I didn't bother, in 1961, to say "his or her readers.") If he makes them badly-that is, if he simply waits, in all purity, for the occasional reader whose perceptions and norms happen to match his own, then his conception must be lofty indeed if we're to forgive him for his bad craftsmanship. But if he makes them well-that is, makes readers see what they have never seen before, moves them into a new order of perceptions and experience altogether-he finds his reward in the peers he has created. (Booth, 1961, 397-98) Some readers have misread that statement as if it were about the fleshand-blood author. Not long after my book came out, some postmodernist stars began to proclaim not only that the author does not make his or her readers; the author is dead. There is no such thing as an authoritative voice, since we all know that each reader makes whatever text gets made: the reader, not the author, makes the reading.1 Others made a case that I had acknowledged but understated-that whatever author we think we find in a text is inescapably a complex association of many contributing forces, including the very fact that we are all social selves, not totally autonomous, isolated, atomized in-dividuals.2 The flesh-and-blood author is already full of conflicts, and in the process of writing most authors find themselves changing the work according to suggestions from friends and editors, and even, as in the case of James Joyce, reprinting printing accidents. The printed text still implies that one author wrote the book; yet it's undeniable that many voices are present in every published work. When we turn to films the case against the claim for a single, autonomous creating author is obviously even stronger. Most novels are published as if a single author had done the work, and individual authors do usually have the final decision about most points. In contrast, every film results, as the long tailpiece lists of credits remind us, from innumerable voices. It's no wonder that most film studies avoid the claim that the author, or the director, or the producer was finally totally responsible. Even the "auteur" movement seldom hinted that one creator did it all. What I would like to see more of is criticism that acknowledges why, even with all the multiplicity of voices, every successful film does have what might legitimately be called an "implied author," or if you prefer, an "implied center"-that is, a creative voice uniting all of the choices. That virtual author, that voice, that center, will never be identical with what any one of the crew could have created. But whenever a movie is fily powerful for any viewer, what that viewer has received is a unified voice. The movie has made its viewer, and has made that viewer either well or badly. Even in movies that are deliberately confusing, like Run Lola Run, the deliberateness is real if the effect is real: a group of voices have finally surrendered to one another in a single direction ("you are to feel confused! …