The MFJS Reporter — Winter 2020 M-W

This week’s lecture was on the argument of auteurism. Auteurism at its bare bones is the idea that there is an author to a film. The claim is that some directors may express an individual vision, world view, over a series of films with stylistic and thematic consistency. Though this seems to be common knowledge now with directors like Quinton Terintino and Wes Anderson, that idea was not always accepted. 

The masses couldn’t understand how this form of entertainment could be any more than just sheer entertainment, let alone a work of art. Jiminez explained it as people nowadays arguing that tik tok creators are artists who have their own stylistic functions.

 It was not until the 1970s that the concept of the author changed from the comparatively naive and impressionistic romanticism of classic auteurism, in which the director’s world view was inscribed into the film by force of his personality, to a more rigorous, even “scientific” consideration of the film text (Grant). 

Jiminez had shown our class two films by director Tod Haynes: Carol and Dark Waters. This specific lecture was based on an argumentative discussion of whether or not Haynes is an auteur. 

Based on the similar dramatic and truth sought narratives that seems to spill over into each of these movies, which is argued that Hayes was in fact an auteur. Another similarity between the two movies was the in terms of mise-en-scene. The two most obvious elements were the lighting and props. Similarly to Carol, Dark Waters’ overall tint is green and yellow. Which emphasised the seriousness of the tone of the movie. The lighting of the dinner scenes, specifically in the first company dinner, is lit by a dim lamp in the middle of the table. We see this same prop in the first and final dinner scene in Carol, and the table set up basically looks the same.

Friedland argued for Haynes auteurism, “Similarities I found between the two films was within the cinematography. The colors were very dull, almost always consistent pastel shades. I think this is an important aspect of Haynes’s auteurship because it seems to be his own great way of signifying the drama and the weight of the situations at hand.” 

Other students disagreed saying Haynes couldn’t be an auteur because the discrepancies between the two films were so vast that finding similarities were a reach. 

Student Jake Gloth justifies his opinion, “Dark Waters and Carol do not show enough evidence to support auteurism. You can see elements in both films that show they are Todd Haynes films, but the differences in style and narrative structure are too great to ignore.” 

Though it was clear that Jiminez thinks Haynes is an auteur, he played devil’s advocate very well to keep everyone thinking, arguing and honestly keep student’s heads from bobbing to sleep. Jiminez made it very clear that there was no right answer and whether or not Haynes has his own stylistic approach can be reasoned both ways.