The French New Wave—among the most important and influential eras in the history of cinema—still resonates in the minds of many film critics. During an era when Hollywood movies were considered hopelessly crass, young turks like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut proclaimed the films of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock to be high art. “Auteur theory,” the idea of the director as a film’s primary author, eventually became the guiding principle of most contemporary film criticism. Yet no less than Andre Bazin, founder and editor of Cahiers du Cinema, warned against the dangers of creating an “aesthetic cult of personality.”
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“Cinephilia and auteurism are partly about the possibility of raising a director like Paul W.S. Anderson to equal if not greater stature than a director like Paul Thomas Anderson,” writes blogger Trevor Link (referring to the acclaimed director of Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and The Master). “From the very beginning, auteurism has served, among other things, to rescue low art and genre pictures like Resident Evil from the unthinking status quo.”
But do Paul W.S. Anderson’s films really need to be rescued? The personal stamp he places on them is all there on the surface; recognizing stylistic consistencies in his work is like shooting fish in a barrel. At the same time, he operates with a degree of freedom the old Hollywood directors could only dreamed of. Nowadays there’s no need to assign authorship to a supposedly misunderstood film or filmmaker—auteurism has become the critical norm. A director’s authorship is presumed from the start.
The late Cliff Doerksen understood this when he reviewed Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator for the Reader in 2004. Anderson, he predicted, would one day be recognized as a “key transitional figure” when movies and videos games merged. How right he was: following Anderson’s example, such proudly vulgar filmmakers as Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank, Gamer) and Greg and Colin Strause (Skyline) have apparently made it their mission to film live-action video games.
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
