Contemporary American cinema appears to offer the widest range of filmic expression possible. From the highest budget blockbuster epic to the lowest budget quirky art film, everything seems to be possible not only to make but also to sell successfully within America, as well as abroad. This variety has not always been this homogenous. American cinema and its makers developed over the years, taught and formed through a variety of social, economic and even educational factors. A dominant film theory, the auteur theory, has been influenced by all three of these factors and they have changed its meaning to a certain extend. The auteur theory firstly appeared in America in connection to the New Hollywood movement, which revolutionised American filmmaking in the late 1960s and was driven by a politically left orientated group of actors and directors, which took over successful filmmaking with independent low budget films like Easy Rider after a major break up of the studio system.
The driving force behind the flood of independent productions in America, was the French New Wave, in the French context independent did not mean free from the big studios money but free from required style rules. The French New Wave created a new film language. Other than the classical Hollywood films who took great care in camera positions chosen for continuity reasons and an invisible editing style the films of the French New Wave were very aware of their medium. Shot on location and edited in jump cuts these films wanted their audience to know that they were films.
Part of this awareness of the medium was the auteur theory. The man behind the camera had to gain the importance the man in front of it had, if not more. In his vitriolic essay ‘A Certain Tendency In French Cinema’ Truffaut created the film auteur. Attacking the French cinema for being old-fashioned, the “cinema du papa” and called for radical changes.[1] Changes that were greatly helped by the equipment becoming cheaper, smaller and lighter, and by a new understanding of the medium film. Truffaut started as a film critic and made his first film Les 400 Coups from a theoretical not a practical approach. This method plays a distinctive role in the work of the American filmmakers in the 60s and 70s.
In 1962 Andrew Sarris brought the auteur theory to America, revolutionising Hollywood in a way that Martin Scorsese called “A breath of fresh air”[2]
Until the end of the 1950s Hollywood was firmly in the hands of the big studios (MGM, Fox, Warner, United Artists, RKO) Films were produced in an assembly line method, writer, director, cameramen all had the same status as just someone along these assembly lines doing his or her job towards the final product. Stars could only be in the front of the camera, never behind it. Audiences knew the names Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, they didn’t know Michael Curtiz. The power of the studios however started to diminish, box office numbers dropped rapidly and studios needed to change their strategies, this was the moment for the so called independents. At this point the term independent for America meant outside of the studio system. The first film which made this development visible was Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. This film was everything that the classical Hollywood movies were not, it played with genres it was violent und highly unconventional. It was deeply influenced by the French New Wave, whose leading voice François Truffaut was originally supposed to direct it[3]. In the end it was directed by the American Arthur Penn. Despite being different or maybe because of that Bonnie and Clyde was a huge success, its box office triumph opened the door for a new generation of films targeted at a younger audience and produced on small budgets which increased their chances of making large winnings at the box office.
“In many ways it is not surprising that the auteur theory succeeded in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It had originally been developed in post-Second World War Europe, in the face of a range of social and political systems that were seen to be no longer working and with an emphasis on the need for a new social world founded on the individual. These values seemed to touch a nerve, both politically and culturally, in the America of the late 1960s, beleaguered as it was by a set of increasingly insupportable political, social and economic crisis.”[4] The auteur theory can be attached to politics, for it allowed independently produced films with a less conservative content to become hits. In times of constant presence of violence through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy, the brutal war in Vietnam and racial uproar, films started commenting on these events. Broken heroes, depiction of violence and the loss, meaninglessness and falsity of the old American values became apparent in films like The Graduate (1967)[5] , Bonnie and Clyde (1967)[6] and Easy Rider (1969) [7]. All of these films were produced outside of the studio system, which had to sell to as large an audience as possible and could not afford to alienate entire groups of the society.
Film therefore became a medium of expression, something of content, something worth studying. At this important moment in film history film turned from being pure entertainment into an art form that was worth discussing.
This intellectualisation of filmmaking was the result of a new generation of film makers that came from universities that had studied films prior to making them.
They new the conventions well enough to break them
Soon however the studios recovered and mainstream blockbusters took over. In the following years there was a constant up and down until studio production and independent cinema levelled and even mixed. Today a clear distinction is often impossible, due to a common co-production system.
In recent years there has been a new left rising, profoundly different from that in the 70s but also a force in Hollywood that can’t be ignored. The heroes of the 70s were Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, Hal Ashby or Peter Fonda. The political players of Hollywood’s new nineties left are George Clooney, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and of course Tim Robbins.
The most striking difference is that most of these big names have made a career in Hollywood before voicing contentious and controversial opinions. They are not film students who want to revolutionise films and film making. They are not reinventing the cinema, but commenting directly on contemporary political issues.
Director Tim Robbins, a very prominent voice of the new left, has made three films so far, do they qualify him for the description auteur?
As an actor Tim Robbins is by all means a child of the contemporary American film, he effortlessly moves around between independent (Jacob’s Ladder, 1991)[8] and the Hollywood blockbuster (War of the Worlds, 2005)[9]. While taking on roles in every genre and pretence, in his directorial career he so far stuck to smaller scale productions of three very different films that were on first sight not connected by style but by a strong political agenda.
Bob Roberts was a satire starring Tim Robbins himself as a senatorial candidate for the Republicans in Pennsylvania. Folk singing and corrupt, Bob Roberts tried to get votes with anything but actual politics. Robbins’ next film was a lot darker but also a lot more successful. Dead Man Walking is a film about the death penalty, made without empty slogans or playing on its audiences heartstrings. It made very clear that Tim Robbins not only trusts his audience to think for itself, he also demands it. His third film was yet another completely different style. The rather lush Cradle Will Rock was a costume drama depicting the events surrounding Orson Welles’ production of Max Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock and the beginning of the communist fear during the great depression in America after the big stock market crash in 1929. It deplored the relationship between art and politics. Arguably the closest topic to Tim Robbins’ own career.
His debut Bob Roberts was released in 1992, right after Robbins’ success in Robert Altman’s The Player. The film shows many similarities to Altman’s work. The self written folk music singing scenes recall Nashville, the vast flood of cameos by stars like James Spader, Peter Gallagher or Susan Sarandon, or the collaboration with Altman’s cameraman of four projects Jean Lépine,[10] with whom Altman also worked on Tanner 88, to which Bob Roberts bears the greatest affinity in Altman’s work. Tanner 88 was a mini-series produced for TV in 1988, sporting the look of a documentary; it followed a fictional democrat presidential candidate on his election tour through America.
Bob Roberts is Tim Robbins’ most aggressive film, attacking the show business like election tours, the dirty campaigns by candidates, the corruptness of politicians, the manipulability of voters and “the news media, whose bubbleheaded telecasters’ happy-talk approach to the news helps Roberts’s rise to power, come under severe criticism in the movie.”[11]
The main character, described as a “conservative rebel” in the film uses the means of the former sixties left movement, singing protest songs that might sound like Bob Dylan, but are about hanging drug addicts and accusing the unemployed of misuse of the welfare system. One of his albums is significantly called “The Times Are Changing Back”. Robbins plays this character as an ambitious, scrupulous hardliner; another reference to Robert Altman for Roberts is reminiscent of Robbins' character in The Player, producer Griffin Mill who, just like Roberts literally gets away with murder. Bob Roberts was a very upfront film stating an opinion or even an accusation rather than discussing it. Tim Robbins’ own political agenda, he supports the “radical presidential candidate Ralph Nader”[12] and his strong leaning towards the left came to the fore. It revealed a filmmaker not afraid to speak his mind clearly and articulated, like he has done on numerous occasions in protest demonstrations.
Dead Man Walking in 1995 put away with the polemic style of Bob Roberts. The story based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean, a nun who supports inmates on death row, drew a portrait of the death penalty situation in America, rather than denouncing it directly. Robbins aspires to show the human side of every single aspect involved. Thereby questioning every side but also not dismissing a single possible opinion. “Robbins presents a compelling and powerful challenge to death-penalty proponents precisely by refusing to back away from the very arguments they voice in support of the death penalty. Dead Man Walking cinematically constructs a dialectic without hidden agendas: while acknowledging the genuine suffering of crime victims and their families, as well as the real brutality of the crime and criminal, the film skilfully reveals the state’s role in replicating that brutality and barbarism when killing in the name of justice.”[13]
Robbins brings the viewer very close to his protagonists with the use of many close ups. Great importance is put on the face of Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen Prejean, not while talking but while listening. She guides the viewer through all the different perspectives on the issue by listening, rather than commenting. The picture is very static, held in brownish colours and is carefully composed. This is radically different from the hectic, colourful and fast edited Bob Roberts where the dialogue was constantly overlapping and few sentences ended without interruption. While Bob Roberts was a film about saying things, Dead Man Walking is more concerned with listening and understanding, offering the audience a much higher level of concentration through a directness that was achieved by the absence of satire, of judgments and of caricaturist characters.
A crucial difference between Robbins’ two first films is that one was about politics and the other about morality. For Robbins “political” has a negative connotation, when asked about his political filmmaking by the magazine Empire he answered “I don’t know about the word “political” – it’s such an off putting word. You immediately think about politicians – dishonesty, manipulation, cynicism. None of those are things I’d associate with this movie, myself or my work. I’m interested in the human condition, humour, show business.”[14] It was the aim to expose the polemics of politics with a film that was very much polemic itself. Therefore a discussion of ethics cannot be polemic because it is aiming at an emotional level, here he gives his audience time to think and a chance to explore their own inclination towards an opinion at the end. “This is about a nun and her relationship with these parents and with the convicted killer. It’s neither about the politics nor about the statistics. It is very difficult to get into listing facts and still keep the emotional component. Any time that happened in the rough cut, it took away. It became polemical and unnecessary.”[15]
At first sight Tim Robbins’ third film Cradle Will Rock (1999) seems to break the pattern of contemporary films about contemporary issues. It is a costume drama set in the 1930s. It combines different stories set in the depression era that combine art and politics. Nelson Rockefeller’s commission of Diego Rivera’s painting in the Rockefeller centre, which ends in the destruction of the painting because of its political content, namely the depiction of Lenin, or the selling of valuable paintings like a DaVinci to support Mussolini’s war effort. The main storyline follows composer Mark Blitzstein, and his play The Cradle Will Rock, put on stage by the young Orson Welles. The play ends up being censored for its sympathy with the union steelworker strike. The film explores the relativity of freedom of art under the control of those who finance it. Thereby posing the question even to Hollywood, whether or not an executive producer has any right to demand a certain outcome or a certain political direction. The film harshly criticises the misuse of art be it by selling it (Mussolini), or used to create a certain image like Nelson Rockefeller does, yes he invested into art, but not in the free expression of the artist.
According to Ben Dickenson the film is also Tim Robbins’ take on the anti-globalisation movement, which Robbins is very committed to, taking part in the big demonstrations in Seattle in 1999. In his book Hollywood’s New Radicalism Dickens says “Cradle Will Rock relates directly to the Seattle experience through metaphors for modern-day globalisation, as when American businessmen and the Italian government exchange bags of cash for political favours. The film explores the polarisation of ordinary Americans and corporate interests that Seattle represented.”[16] This is a somewhat brave statement considering that the film was released in the year of the Seattle demonstrations, but it is interesting to point out that the anti-globalisation movement gained moment under a Democrat president who advertised the international community as opposed to his predecessors George Bush, Sr. and Ronald Reagan, who cultivated the “ideology of foreign threat” [17], while Clinton’s politic opened the USA up towards the world, it also forwarded the globalisation of businesses. Cradle Will Rock advertises the power of public disobedience, of the possibility to protest and the triumph of the united masses against mandatory governmental regulations. While Diego Rivera’s painting is destroyed the cast of the play performs The Cradle Will Rock from within the packed audience of the shut down theatre. This can not only be read as a statement about the world politics but also towards the relation between Hollywood and independent film. The more independent films are, the more can they allow themselves an opinion and an individual taste, the more they can diverge from the mainstream.
Interestingly enough, Tim Robbins’ films are hybrid co-productions, which again shows how blurred the division often is today but also, targets his films away from the mainstream entertainment towards a selected audience, but still keeps them outside of a niche viewing. Much like the independent films in the 60s were aimed at an educated, younger and politicised audience. The successors of films like Easy Rider or Bonnie and Clyde are these mixed productions, not the completely independent films anymore.
Cradle Will Rock has many aspects in common with Bob Roberts, a large cast of many famous people (from Bill Murray to Susan Sarandon), the hectic colourful scenes, many people talking at the same time. The openly voiced politics that clearly put the film into a leftist corner, are not satirically expressed like in Bob Roberts, but displaced into another time thus allowing the observation of the result of the fight between art, politics and money as well as the impact of civil peaceful protest.
Despite the great discrepancy Dead Man Walking possesses in terms of style, casting, mise-en-scene and subtlety there is a theme that runs through all of Robbins’ films. They are films about hypocrisy. Bob Roberts, conservative politician and songwriter singing “drugs stink” while using a plane that supposedly delivers relief aid to middle America for drug and weapon trafficking; Nelson Rockefeller who patronises art but only as long as it is politically compatible with his American conservatism and his business empire and in Dead Man Walking the pretence of punishing murder with state-approved killing. As a famous lyric by songwriter Holly Near that was to become international slogan against the death penalty puts it: “Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?”[18]
Is that enough to call Tim Robbins an auteur? Andrew Sarris wrote in 1962 about the need of a “distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.”[19] Sarris ads that this is a much harder task for film makers who develop their own scripts because they can too easily put all their intentions onto the screen in dialogue, storyline and genre rather than being reduced to finding their own handwriting in their style. This however is the auteur theory in its very beginnings, in its first articulation for America, when the writer-director was still an exception. In order to survive and develop, the auteur theory had to change according to the industry. It has to a certain extend adapted its use to the post-modern concentration on the individual and has thereby attracted notice not only on the directors work but also on his person. “One common characteristic of new American auteurs like Tarantino or David Lynch is the instantaneity of their careers. The brief duration of auteur celebrity these days parallels the rapid turnover of post-modern consumerism. Without being nostalgic, I would at least like to follow Andrew and urge this notion of duration as the missing element in the account of the modern American auteur.”[20] The matter of celebrity is not to be underestimated.
The director Tim Robbins draws the recognition of his persona not from his acting career, but from his public activism. The three main aspects of Tim Robbins’ persona support each other, his acting recognition made his protest more audible which then fuels the understanding of his films. To fully appreciate his films it is important to know where Tim Robbins himself is standing. Since his position towards the death penalty is widely known, he can allow himself more than others would be able to, to take an objective position. He can show every aspect, every argument, and every perspective on his subject matter without fearing to be misunderstood. He can play the caricaturist figure of Bob Roberts without fearing not to be taken seriously. The contemporary Hollywood auteur is not only generated through his released films but also through his public persona. Quentin Tarantino supports his patchwork film style with his day job in a video rental place that allowed him extensive viewing of films thereby giving him the foundation for his work. His public image of loving and knowing about films also saves his films from not being acknowledged, ensuring his credibility.
“There are many kinds of auteurs in contemporary film culture. And there are many strategies through which a moviemaker can employ the agency of auteurism and by which audiences can use it as a way of understanding the films.”[21] This quote by Timothy Corrigan implies yet another aspect of the changes in the auteur theory, apart from the director himself becoming part of his own work. The auteur theory is not only a means of scholarship anymore. It has become an advertisement method. The name Tarantino sells a film, it is more than the director’s name, it has become a brand name “The practice of labelling films according to the name of a single filmmaker, usually the director, has become widespread in Hollywood.”[22] In a way the modern auteur has replaced the genre. When the audience went to see a Western in classical Hollywood they knew exactly what they would get. Today you can say the same about “a Tarantino”. The same goes for Tim Robbins, there is a certain expectancy linked to the name of the director. The actor Tim Robbins keeps serving a different purpose. After finishing Dead Man Walking Tim Robbins acted in the Martin Lawrence vehicle Nothing To Lose. Robbins keeps himself in a wider public recollection, by acting for every type of audience which then again keeps his political voice loud enough, ensures him interviews.
The American auteurs have always been independent from a political conviction. Frank Capra has gained the status as much as Quentin Tarantino is referred to as auteur. But since it started being discussed in America in the late sixties, it will always share some connection with America’ filmmaking left. While this left came out of the hippie movement in the 60s and 70s stirring up the system, today it often comes straight out of the system without any trouble to cross back into it. Many of those connected to the recent politisation of Hollywood are household names. Once again gaining moment through the strong opposition to government.
George Clooney’s second film as a director was a take on true events taking place during the McCarthy hearings. Good Night and Good Luck told the story of news presenter Edward R. Murrow and dealt with the responsibility of the news to be independent and critical of the government. Released in a time of embedded journalism and retributions to those who publicly contested President George W. Bush. Tim Robbins is once again in the first row. Directing a play on Broadway called Embedded and openly speaking out against the war in Iraq. This led to his disinvitation from the celebration of the 15th anniversary of the release of the film Bull Durham by the Baseball Hall of Fame. Robbins was sent a letter stating “We believe your very public criticism of President Bush in this important – and sensitive – time in our nations history helps undermine the U.S. position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger” to which Robbins replied “I reject your suggestion that one must be silent in times of war.[…] You are using what power you have to infringe upon my rights to free speech and by taking this action hope to intimidate the millions of others that disagree with our president. I doing so, […] you dishonour […] the men and women who have fought wars to keep this nation a place where one can freely express their opinion without fear of reprisal or punishment.”[23] Once again is Robbins fighting against hypocrisy, defending moral values rather than party political convictions.
Can Tim Robbins then, be called an auteur in modern Hollywood?
Following Timothy Corrigan’s stressing of the duration of a directorial career necessary to determine the auteur quality of a director, judging Tim Robbins on his three films might be a bit early. With a closer look on the connection of his public persona to his films and clearly developed reoccurring themes in them of hypocrisy, ethics of human coexistence and the void between talking and listening; as well as subtle but recognisable style devices, the director Robbins gradually moves towards a homogenous, auteuristic body of work. With his film school background [24] and his government opposing left directed activism he moves steadily in the footsteps of Hollywood’s first rebels of the 1960s.
[1] François Truffaut “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” in Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings et al., ed. The Film Studies Reader (London : Arnold, 2000), pp. 58 - 63
[2] David A. Cook ‘ Auteur Cinema and the Film Generation in 1970s Hollywood’ in Jon Lewis, ed. The New American Cinema (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 1998), p. 13
[3] David A. Cook ‘ Auteur Cinema and the Film Generation in 1970s Hollywood’ in Jon Lewis, ed. The New American Cinema (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 1998), p.1
[4] Michael Allen, Contemporary US Cinema (Essex: Pearson Education Ltd, 2003), p. 91
[5] The Graduate (Dir. Mike Nichols, USA, 1967)
[6] Bonnie and Clyde (Dir. Arthur Penn, 1967)
[7] Easy Rider (Dir. Dennis Hopper, USA, 1969)
[8] Jacob’s Ladder (Dir. David Lyne, USA, 1991)
[9] War Of The Worlds (Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA, 2005)
[10] Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders (New York: New York University Press, 1999) p. 258
[11] Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders (New York: New York University Press, 1999) p. 258
[12] Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006) p. 142
[13] Roy Grundmann and Cynthia Lucia, “Between Ethics and Politics: An Interview with Tim Robbins”, in Cineaste, v. 22 nr. 2 July 1996, p. 4
[14] Empire One-On-One in Empire, Vol. 131, May 2000, p. 124
[15] Roy Grundmann and Cynthia Lucia, “Between Ethics and Politics: An Interview with Tim Robbins”, in Cineaste, v. 22 nr. 2 July 1996, p. 5
[16] Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006) p. 114
[17] Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006) p. 34
[18] http://www.hollynear.com/lyrics/foolish.notion.html, accessed 1st January 2007
[19] Andrew Sarris, „Notes On The Auteur Theory In 1962“, Leo Braudy et. Al., ed. Film Theory and Criticism: introductory readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 562
[20] Timothy Corrigan, “Auteurs and the New Hollywood”, Jon Lewis, ed. The New American Cinema (Durhamand London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 59
[21] Timothy Corrigan, “Auteurs and the New Hollywood”, Jon Lewis, ed. The New American Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 58
[22] Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema (New York, Columbia University Press, 2002) p. 85
[23] Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006) p. 138
[24] Empire One-On-One in Empire, Vol. 131, May 2000, p.122
