Dude, that’s not how it works. This is art, not science. See above, re: descriptive versus prescriptive.
The system of critical thought known as “the auteur theory” is useful in discussing the work of directors like Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk. It is less useful, or even useless, in discussing the work of many other directors, except perhaps as a contrast.
Just because there are many directors to whom the auteur theory does NOT apply doesn’t in any infinitesimal way prove that there are ZERO directors to whom it DOES apply. That’s just ludicrous.
Scientific standards of falsifiability are utterly, utterly out of place–surreally so–in a discussion of an artist’s approach to their art.
It’s not a scientific law, it’s an artistic opinion.
As a side note, the auteur theory as applied to television usually posits the producers as the auteurs rather than the directors, who tend to be hired guns. It’s the producers who conceive a series, develop the plotlines and choose the actors, and generally they stick around for the entire run of the series. I think Aaron Spelling is probably the ultimate argument for television producer as auteur (even if, say, Seventh Heaven doesn’t quite fit the established pattern).
I’d also argue that in the UK (and possibly other countries as well, though I’m not familiar with their television programming), it’s not the producers who are the auteurs, but the writers. In contrast to the high-turnover teams of writers of most American shows, British and Irish programs tend to be written by one or two people over the course of the series’s lifespan. In other words, the term “auteur” is not limited to directors, even though they are the ones singled out in discussions of movies.
Yeah, when you’re discussing artistic opinions, you can, in fact, just make things up, in a way. That’s pretty much how it works. It’s not a science, it’s an art. “Falsifiability” is simply an utterly irrelevant concept in any such discussion.*
Again, an artistic theory is after the fact: trying to understand something that’s already happened; describing an existing piece of art. It has no use–nor is it intended to–as a predictor of future artistic occurrences. It is not falsifiable, it does not predict patterns of behavior, it is not prescriptive in any way. It is purely, entirely, descriptive.
*[Second paragraph.]
> First of all, you (and the writer of the article) is getting the auteur theory wrong.
> That’s not unsual: the basic principle as stated by Andrew Sarris has been
> completely misconstrued for years. Sarris did not say that the director is not
> automatically the “auteur” of the film; he specifically gave examples of films that
> had no auteur (e.g, “Casablanca”), and spoke of films where the script was
> more important than the director (he called these “filmed but not directed”).
Why are you talking as if the auteur theory started with Andrew Sarris? Surely you know that it started with a group of French film critics, particularly Francois Truffaut, in Cahiers du Cinema:
The auteur theory is bad as a general theory of cinema because it’s so easy to show that the main influence on most films is not the director but instead all of the significant people who are working on the film. In some sense, auteurism is a lazy theory. Instead of doing some serious research to discover who was responsible for each of the elements of the film, an auteurist thinks that all he has to do is look at the director’s credit on the film. Indeed, it’s not even satisfactory to read the credits and try to connect the film with just those people who are credited as being the director, the writer, etc. Just look at the example mentioned in the OP. The Last Picture Show wasn’t directed by Peter Bogdonavich. It was co-directed by Bogdanovich and Polly Platt, with her consulting with him for every shot, although Bogdanovich was the person who shouted “Action!”. Platt also was involved in the writing of the film. Furthermore, Bogdanovich (and probably Platt) were heavily involved in the editing of the film, with Donn Cambern, the credited editor, not doing that much. (Or at least that’s what Bogdanovich says. That should be further reseached.) It would also be useful to look at Bogdanovich’s film criticism and see to what extent The Last Picture Show is or isn’t an application of his film theories.
Furthermore, the film shows all sorts of affinities with other films and books written by Larry McMurtry. When I saw Brokeback Mountain, my first reaction was “Wow, it’s obvious how similar this is to The Last Picture Show. Why have so few of the reviews of this film even bothered to mention McMurtry’s name?” Also, any analysis of The Last Picture Show would go through the film careers of each of the major actors in the film and show how their being cast in the film influenced how the film came out.
Of course it’s possible to analyze a few films reasonably well simply by looking at the director’s career. Those tend to be small-budget films where nobody else interesting was involved with the film. They are usually films where the director also wrote the script. For nearly any other film (including most good films), using the auteur theory is a lousy way to analyze the film.
The interesting thing then is that while the auteur theory is a terrible example of film criticism, it’s often a useful manifesto for new filmmakers. It’s a way for new filmmakers to convince themselves that they are capable of ignoring many of the current canons of how a film should be made and making a film that’s quite different from the films that are currently being made. That’s how it worked for the auteurist critics in France who inspired (and sometimes became) the directors of the New Wave films in France. By convincing themselves that their films would not just be different, but vastly better, than the films that were being made at the time in France, they convinced themselves that they would be the saviors of French film. (I gather that auteurism had the same effect on the major directors in the U.S. from about 1967 to 1981.) That’s how artistic manifestos work: They allow the new artists to vastly inflate their importance. Only by doing this (even though it’s allowing these new artists to think more highly of themselves than their talent deserves), they acquire enough confidence to break away from the current canons of their art form. They are not truly as important as they think they are, but they are certainly different from the artists who are currently ruling the scene, and it’s important that art always moves in new directions. Unfortunately, auteurism doesn’t tend to be a good philosophy when these young directors become famous and become the arbitrators of the current film canon themselves. Such people tend to become stuck in the new mold that they’ve created for themselves.