Style and Signature in Film

Abstract

As mentioned in the introduction, recent film theory has been afraid of using the notion of the auteur and is quite dismissive of the Nouvelle Vague’s belief in style as marking the most salient thematic and formal characteristics of some filmmakers. This critical attitude is in line with the rejection of subjectivity that was thematized by the most avant-garde theoretical approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. Unfortunately, the fear of falling into the Romantic myth of the artist has created a split between academia and the rest of the world; and so-called ‘theory’ ends up being confined to academic studies and separated out from the everyday relationship with art. Names of various types of artists or authors circulate; their usage belongs to our linguistic exchanges, to the normal flow of mean-ing. Strangely enough, the rejection of a mild form of authorship — and the confusion of this with the idolatry of genius — maintains a Romantic vein: the very one of the nihilist outcomes of some forms of Romanticism, such as the belief in the end of intentionality; the belief that, as phrased by Jacques Lacan, we are ‘spoken’ through language and that the notion of representation would deny the rights of the signifier. I am therefore putting the case for the middle ground; namely the conviction that the fact that some authors have specific styles does not detract from the amount of impersonality that is inherent in any creative act.