It was Francois Truffaut who inaugurated the term 'auteur' in his essay of 1954, 'A certain Tendency of the French Cinema.' As we all know, his idea was to situate the director as the 'author' of a film. While this idea has obvious drawbacks (does the actress or cinematographer or producer not determine a film's meaning?), it nevertheless has proven to be enormously effective in legitimating film as an art in its own right. We now all celebrate the work of something called "Scorcese" or "Hitchcock." Indeed a film needs a director, and it is he (still almost always a man) who, among other things, is named last in any film's credits, as stipulated in the Director's Guild of America. For us, it is not coincidental that the DGA also insists that it is Allen Smithee who is held responsible for Hollywood's orphaned films.

Smithee's genealogy clearly stretches back to Hollywood's blacklisting of alleged communist directors, actors, screenwriters in the years leading up to Truffaut. That the directors in Smithee's stable choose to associate themselves with those whose careers were in many cases ruined by Hollywood's capitulation to Cold War paranoia is a phenomenon open to multiple interpretations. Can it simply be seen as the return of history, this second time as farce? It may also be a stark reminder of Hollywood's economics: you can make a name for yourself, but it never belongs to you. These days, however, it is less and less necessary to have a name to make a killing in Hollywood (another lesson, maybe, that comes from the Red Scare). As the soon-bo-be-released Joe Eszterhaus vehicle An Alan Smithee Film sic. promises to "out" Smithee, we clearly stand on the edge of an epistemological shift in auteurism.

Allen Smithee is the only director.

One question we wish to address is why, given the fact that we stand roughly the same distance from Truffaut as Truffaut himself did from the birth of Hollywood, why have we seen no new principle of film viewership articulated? Why do we still need a director in order to make sense of a film? Finally, why should Taxi Driver necessarily tell us more about our historical moment than, say, The Birds II or the Horrible Terror?

In literary scholarship, the idea of the "author" as a category became quite contentious in the late 1960's. Among other things, this was meant to liberate the reader from the position of "serving the author." Smithee presents a similar opportunity for the viewer. The idea of reading films as books, as things with plots, characters and authors belongs to the past. Smithee doesn't care if you see any of these things in his films or not. In Smithee's films, other points of fascination take priority.

In fact, this is the very point of Truffaut's own writing on film that has been ignored. Not only did he champion directors who were not considered artists (not only Hitchcock, but also for example Norman Taurog, who also directed a number of Elvis Presley vehicles), but he also often celebrated a film for the experience of Technicolor or CinemaScope, for the curiously emancipatory effect "bad" direction has on Marilyn Monroe in Niagara. Smithee insists that a film must have more to recommend it than a pair of thumbs.

The question from The Red Shoe Diaries is answered by Death of a Gunfighter:

"Was he real, or am I making him up?"
"The honest truth is we don't want a man that good anymore."