i’ve been reading stuff by the film critic serge daney, and these passages from this retrospective piece on the french new wave from the late 80s made me revisit thoughts i’ve had about “auteurism” in videogames:
having already broken down in film at the time this essay was written, the conditions for this type of auteur no longer exist in any medium. but maybe that’s part of what made videogames as a commercial medium interesting in the late 80s through early 00s, that there was a system in place that enabled that kind of work and attitude, and now there’s only space at an industrial level for a small number of clouzot types.
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The way I always viewed auteurism in film as originally put forth by Truffaut was that it was a formalist critique attempting to define what the mode of cinematic expression actually is, cf. a literary criticism that related to movies as “a text”. The directors of the Hollywood studio system were particularly revealing of this since they were given assignments not of their choosing, seldom generated their own material, and worked within narrow parameters, yet many had uniquely identifiable aesthetic signatures, because the true fulcrum that cinematic expression rests on is more than “filmed words”.
It relates directly to Truffaut’s famous description of a scene in Scarface: “The most striking scene in the movie is Boris Karloff’s death. He squats down to throw a ball in a game of ninepins and doesn’t get up; a rifle shot prostrates him. The camera follows the ball he’s thrown as it knocks down all the pins except one that keeps spinning until it finally falls over, the exact symbol of Karloff himself, the last survivor of a rival gang that’s been wiped out by Muni. This isn’t literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema.”
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this passage quoted is 100% correct and it’s something i keep having to bring up to video game people whenever they complain about games having a supposed “auteur” problem. i also talked about this on the tail end of my California Problem post about indie games from 2023. though it always feels like it’s hard to get anywhere with a lot of people on this issue.
auteurism was originally an idea put forward by French critics who loved Hollywood but hated a lot of middlebrow French cinema (tho they loved a few French directors they like who they saw as outsiders like Jean Renoir or Robert Bresson). it was very much a celebration of working within constraints of genre, style, and budget and making something that elevated within that vs. something that tried to appear more cultured but was staid and more artistically conservative and didn’t reckon with the unique tools of the medium. at the time in Hollywood producers were extremely high profile and powerful names but directors were largely unsung and unknown in the public outside of a few celebrity directors like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock etc.
so yeah, it was necessary to identify specific through-lines of people working within the studio system in Hollywood who had an identifiable style in order to like, place themselves in a larger lineage with the movies they were trying to make. in some ways it was weird French nerds imposing themselves on people in contexts that had nothing to do with them, but this wave was basically a seed that opened up cinema as an artistic medium and spread globally. also re: videogames, the Japanese game industry is probably a closer and more appropriate analogue to the Hollywood studio system for many different reasons. that’s partly why i think these French critics were basically the selectbutton/bloggers of their own context lol.
the idea of the “auteur” as like someone who controls all aspects of the process came in part via Andrew Sarris who popularized the idea in America as more of a a scientific thing that could be proved vs. like, a valuable lens for looking at art. this helped sort of define the new Hollywood which took over in part because the old studio system had been in crisis since the 50’s. and because directors became rock star celebrities it led to a lot more wild and crazy behavior. though that kind of started to wane by the beginning of the 80’s basically because a lot of those “auteur” projects stopped making money. but disgusting exploitation and abuses of power have been endemic to Hollywood throughout its entire history, “auteur” or not.
i don’t think the idea of the “auteur” in games has ever meaningfully existed to the same extent that it does with film. there are definitely identifiable figures but i don’t know that most of them are held in the same regard or as public as some directors were outside of some exceptions like Shigeru Miyamoto or Hideo Kojima. also i’d say in a lot of cases in games people almost overwhelmingly associate “auteur” with “bad boss” at this point which again, is not really where the term came from and belies a basic misunderstanding of the concept. i really think one cannot give themselves the label of auteur - it has to be assigned to them. it’s something to be earned from working within a specific context vs. like a self important label.
tl;dr i think if people want to meaningfully study games as an artistic medium, celebrating and putting forth some greater idea of authorship is really important and necessary to remove games from like this idea of brands and ips and companies that still unfortunately dominates most of the space. and that’s what bothers me about people complain about games’s supposed “auteur problem” when it’s clear that corporate ownership and ip and everything else are much more massive of a problem and are the primary thing responsible for holding games back as a medium in so many different ways. that doesn’t mean we have to elevate the individual as like some larger than life boy genius figure like some people want to. it’s more to just celebrate the every day process of making good art from within a context and limitations that are often hostile or difficult to navigate.
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