Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

noticeably the case, for example, with the American Hitchcock who was adversely
compared with the British Hitchcock, or the American Fritz Lang versus the German Fritz
Lang.
Film critic Andrew Sarris was the leading advocate of the “auteur theory” in the
United States. In his “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” which was inspired by other
critics in Cahiers, Sarris establishes a list of the fourteen Hollywood directors 65 he
considers worthy of entry into his pantheon. The list, far from being exhaustive, does not
include the work of such directors as Billy Wilder or Stanley Kubrick, for example.
Attacks in the US were immediately registered both on the excesses expressed by the
critics of Cahiers and by the provocative list of names proposed by Andrew Sarris.
Regarding the auteur theory, just as Truffaut did, Sarris considered it to be a “polemical
weapon for a given time and a given place” (in Wartenberg & Curran 2005:104). He also
added that the contribution of each director to a certain film had less to do, from a stylistic
point of view, with the work of other directors on the project than with his own previous
work, as he stresses about the noir High Sierra (1941):
Sometimes, a great deal of corn must be husked to yield a few kernels of internal
meaning. I recently saw Every Night at Eight [1935] one of the many maddeningly
routine films Raoul Walsh has directed in his long career. This 1935 effort featured
George Raft, Alice Faye, Frances Langford, and Patsy Kelly in one of those
familiar plots about radio shows of the period. The film keeps moving along in the
pleasantly unpretentious manner one would expect of Walsh until one
incongruously intense scene with George Raft thrashing about in his sleep,
revealing his inner fears in mumbling dream-talk. The girl he loves comes into
the room in the midst of unconscious avowals of feeling and listens
sympathetically. This unusual scene was later amplified in High Sierra [1941] with
Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. The point is that one of the screen’s most virile
directors employed an essentially feminine narrative device to dramatize the
emotional vulnerability of his heroes. If I had not been aware of Walsh in Every
Night at Eight, the crucial link to High Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such
are the joys of the auteur theory. (in Mast & Marshall 1979:665)
The “joys of the auteur theory” were soon translated into something broader for
Sarris, who believed that the auteur theory diverged from the theory (or the cinema) of
directors. Aware of this, and to avoid being “accused of misappropriating a theory no one
65 As an important reference, the list includes the names of Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D. W. Griffith,
Howard Hawks, Buster Keaton, and Orson Welles, from the American side; Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F.
W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, and Joseph von Sternberg, from the German side; Charles Chaplin, Alfred
Hitchcock, from the British directors; and the French Jean Renoir.
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