Collective Authorship in Film

Authorship is a problem in film studies that simply will not go away. Despite all sorts of arguments reducing authors to abstract entities such as author-functions, fictional surrogates, and implied authors, and eventually abandoning them under the mantra of “the death of the author,” we have not been able in our critical and historical discourses to shrug off talking about films as if they are the products of real individuals. In this article I explain why I feel that we are right to continue to do so. Arguments eschewing empirical authors share an anti-intentionalist core that locates meaning at the point of reception. Despite a reasonable level of coherency to these views, they nevertheless cannot satisfy various practical objections. When engaging a text, we aim to understand what someone intended to convey by producing that text in the way that they did and not simply what the text means, either textually or intertextually. There is a fundamental issue of accountability. For instance, I am led to believe that Hitler’s Mein Kampf forwards an anti-Semitic and confrontational thesis. Is this offensive thesis the product of the act of reading or the intention of its author? The former view indemnifies the man behind the text, whereas the latter holds him responsible for the views expressed. Similarly, because the politics of Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1934) are troubling, understanding Riefenstahl’s intentions in making the film has motivated historical and critical interest. Neither the death of the author nor any author-surrogate theories will allow us to consider Riefenstahl’s accountability because meaning on these views rests with the reader and is disconnected from her intentions. Others complain that poststructural authorship theories abandoned authors just as they became politically necessary. How can one assert any sort of identity, be this racial, sexual, gendered, political, cultural, or even personal, when it is argued that meaning is to be found between language (or cultural representation in general) and reception? As many current theories of authorship in film studies stand, they confuse authorship with the marks of authorship identifiable in a text, conflate purpose with meaning, and obscure the analysis of authorship with secondary issues such as aesthetic value, ideology, politics, agency, and interpretation. Certainly these secondary issues are all of primary importance in understanding the way that authorship functions in cultural and aesthetic production, but they are nevertheless secondary theoretical issues that must be sectioned off if we are to understand what it means to be an author. Only by first understanding what authorship is can we then proceed to investigate issues such as artistic authorship or the way that authorship fits within a wider sociocultural framework. Recently, our perspective on authorship has been backward. Authorship is not a concept to be derived from a text but an intentional action of an intending agent that causes a text.1 The view of authorship I offer here endorses real individuals communicating ideas intentionally and applies not only to the arts, such as literature, film, music, and painting, but everyday events, such as conversation. Looking at authorship across various media allows me to identify general components of authorship and communication without the complications that film introduces. I focus on film in the second half of this article to highlight the problem of collective authorship that, although not foreign to literary authorship, is generally not as common.2 The properties of a medium will not dictate whether it can have authors, only how authorship can function