6

Hidden Hands at Wark Authorship, the Intentional Flux, and the

Dynamics of Collaboration

Colin Burnett

Introduction

The study of authorship has not only elevated film and other media as means of personal expression; it has promoted a particular way of explaining authors' works. l It is a common place of authorship criticism and scholarship to claim that an author began with a fully formed idea - artistic, political, religious, etc. - and then used a medium to express it. Implied in the standard approach to authorship intentionality is the notion that an author's intention - a personal worldview or philosophical commitment - offers a complete blueprint for the works produced, a full picture of why the finished works have the characteristics that they do.

However, working from an author's "vision" or "worldview" alone can lead to a rather static, even empty conception of artistic production. What draws many of us to the study of authors is a curiosity for the dynamic behind the scenes - for the stages of conception, preparation, and execution that characterize the working methods of authors. No intention has a simple life, after all; some intentions remain relatively stable during the inventive process, hut given the complexities of production, this is something akin to a stoty of survival in the wild. Other intentions are less fortunate; they are rejected entirely or undergo significant transformation. Ultimately, the story of how an original intention filters through creative practice, how intentions undergo moment-by-moment adjustments on the set, is no mere curiosity for the obsessive; these shifts and refinements - how intentions move - more so than "visions" or "worldviews" provide reliable explanations for the finer aspects of authors' works.

A more appropriate model of authorship therefore considers what might be called the author's intentional flux. If authorship critics and scholars wish to attribute works to the individual sensibility at the helm, they can also benefit

A Companion to Media Authorship, First Edition. Edited by Jonathan Gray and DerekJohnson. © 2013John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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from appreciating how the authors' preliminary stances enter into a dynamic relation with production personnel on individual projects. An author's films do not simply "express" prefonned ideas or commitments; rather, an author's original intentions are catalysts that only partially "produce" the works. Stages of practical art-making - fresh moments of intention related to skill acquisition, collaboration, and fine-grained, local innovation - intervene between the initiating stances and the final works, and accounting for them brings us closer to what the author and his crew in fact intended.

Critics and scholars often study the interviews and writings of auteurs such as Robert Bresson to gain access to the intentions - the worldview. vision, or commitments - that caused the films, but this approach tells only part of the story. In his many interviews between 1934 and 1983, Bresson consistently promoted his cinema as an experiment in austere or minima listie storytelling - as an alternative to the "photographed theater" of conventional cinema. But these interviews and writings are useful only to the extent that they are markers of where a production began, or where it ended up. A very different impression forms as we consider other materials, like interviews with collaborators, which show how Bresson's broad commitment to minimal or restrained storytelling was translated into a new set of intentions.

Of particular interest in this chapter is how Bresson worked with the cine-matographer Leonee-Henri Burel to translate the author's restrained conception of cinema into concrete photographic solutions for Journal d 'un cure de cam-pagne/ Diary of a Country Priest (1951). Their collaboration shows the author's intentions in flux: Bresson relied upon Burel's skills and expertise to discover new ways to strip his images of showy effects - in other words, new targets for Bresson to aim for in his subsequent production. Bresson's preliminary stance to achieve a pared-down look guided their practice, but the problems and solutions related to it shifted over the course of their collaboration.

Through the intentional flux paradigm, students offilm and media can continue to attribute films, television shows, and videogarnes to a Single, governing agent who stipulates its broad aesthetic commitments; but they can also develop an appreciation for the hidden hands at work in an author's art.

The Author's Intentional Flux: A Low Altitude Theory

A film or media historian is like a detective arriving at the scene of a crime. The detective collects availahle clues and makes inferences about how and why an agent (a murderer, a burglar, etc.) performed a criminal act. If no surveillance camera footage exists, the detective does not have direct access to the event. She must reconstruct or re-enact it in order to understand what the perpetrator's intentions were before arriving on the scene, how the perpetrator staged the crime and the character and effects of his actions. Film and media historians also look to

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clues - this time about the creation of a work. With the work itself and the effects it creates, interviews with the filmmaker or showrunner, documents that creative personnel leave for posterity, etc., a historian tries to reverse engineer the work.

The detective work of the film or media historian depends on an understanding of the nature of intentions. As the philosopher Noel Carroll argues, the artwork is, from the point of view of the critic, "a display of the artist's agency.'" Viewing the work as the product of an individual's volition helps the critic formulate expectations about, and begin to understand, the work.

At least two related objections tend to be raised against the historical detective work of discovering artistic intentions. The first is the "inaccessibility argument," which objects that artistic intentions are ultimately unavailable.3 Whether the artist is dead or alive, or whether we have access to the artist's detailed production notes or to the artist herself, the original idea that brought the artist to act creatively remains out of reach. But this objection ignores how accessible the intentions of others tend to be. Cognitive psychologists have shown that in our everyday lives we regularly make inferences about the intentions of those around us. "Mind·reading" is a basic skill of our evolutionary developmenr.4 When an audience claps for a public speaker, the speaker infers that the audience intends to convey appreciation. When a driver of a car ushers a pedestrian on by waving his hand, the pedestrian infers that the driver intends to signal that it is safe to cross. And there is no reason to believe that artistic intentions are any less accessible.

A related objection is the intentional fallacy properly named, which states that the meanings that can be gleaned from the work are not limited to those prescribed by the artist. 5 An artist's statements about his or her intentions, in other words, cannot place limits on or dictate the legitimacy ofthe meanings a spectator discovers. The fallacy addresses unwarranted strictures placed on the range of possible interpretations that spectators proliferate, and argues that an author's intended meanings should not necessarily be granted primacy.

Historical explanation - the detective work of historians - is a special kind of meaning.making activity. Its aims imply the acceptance of certain strictures from the outset. It is difficult to imagine how a historian could offer explanations for a work without giving special attention to the motives that inspired its making. After all, without these motives, we would have no work to speak of. In this case, granting priority to the artist's intentions is warranted, for these intentions are reliable guides in the historian's detective work. or course, an artist's intentions do not alone explain a work - the detective work of historians involves considering contextual factors as well. Beyond an author's intentions, many aesthetic, social, economic, technolOgical, and ideological norms and inputs are likely to have swayed his or her crew's But, as one film historian has remarked, broad impersonal forces alone, like "the zeitgeist," cannot switch on the camera· Because mental events like an artist's intentions do move the sorts of physical events involved in making movies and other media, these guiding intentions stake a claim on the explanations the historian discovers for the work.

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The intentional fallacy is also limited because it presupposes that the meanings of an artwork are the product of a single, unmoving intention. In response to W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, who first described the intentional fallacy, the philosopher Jvan Soll writes:

in fannulating the question about the relation of the author CO the meaning of the work as one about the author's "intentions," they treated intentions as if they were always fully-developed plans, consciously entertained by the author prior to the execution of the work. And this indefensibly nai've and restrictive cartoon of what intentions are and how they operate was exploited to make more plausible their rejection of the relevance of the author's "intentions" to the interpretation and evaluation ofthe work. Works of art and other human endeavors often, indeed probably most often, proceed without a prior blueprint or fully developed plan. The overtly restrictive mis-identification of intentions with such full and prior plans creates the illusion that intentions playa less important role in the construction of these works than they actually do.7

If artistic intentions are accessible, and if they are not detailed blueprints that chart a clear course for achieving the final work, how are we to understand them?

This last problem with the intentional fallacy - the fact that artistic intentions are not handy or expedient blueprints for rhe final work - suggests that in order to perform the detective work of inferring explanations for a film or television episode, the student offilm and media arts would benefit from conceiving intentions as ever-evolving phenomena. The art historian Michael Baxandall describes intentions as mental events - "to shoot on location," or "to express one's view about history through cinema" - that constitute a moving target for the historian. An intention viewed in this way is simply a mental event that propels the sorts of activities that result in an artwork.s Usually, a work will result from a sequence - a flux - of these mental events. Perhaps because of the difficulties in uncovering moment-to-moment intentional shifts, scholars commonly resort to a more manageable, static picture of the relationship between intentions and the final work (where "J" is an intention and "w" is the work that results from it):

J=W

As this reasoning goes, rhe original intention is fully formed from rhe instant the author conceived the work and remains so through to its completion. As Baxandall explains, a static notion of intention supposes "just a preliminary stance to which the final product either more or less conforms.'" The work is reduced to "a conceptual or ideal art imperfectly realized."'o

Something like a static notion of intention has long been a fixture of commentary on the cinema of Robert Bresson. Bresson's contribution to film art is often discussed as the innovation of an elliptical narrative theory. II Because Bresson wishes to showcase this rheory, his films elide "extraneous" events in the story,

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rendering the storytelling more streamlined at some points and more indirect, or suggestive, at others. A classic expression of Bresson's elliptical theory is seen in Pickpocket (1959), in one of the most famous ellipses in French film history.

The film's protagonist, Michel (Martin Lasalle), is a loner and a thief, and at one point flees Paris to avoid the law. He purchases a train ticket and makes his way to the plarform to board the train (Figure 6.1). Once he is on the train we cut to a diary entry, written in the past tense, where he recounts the two years he spent carousing in England (Figure 6.2). We then cut to a shot of Michel returning to Paris (Figure 6.3). While a more conventional filmmaker might have handled this event through an elaborately choreographed and edited montage sequence depicting Michel's escapades in Britain, Bresson elides it, paring the plot down to a character's recollection through a written record (which is reinforced through the character's voice-over narration).

This version of Bresson explores the films as more or less perfect manifestations of the filmmaker's elliptical principles. The filmmaker begins with an axiomatic commitment to paring away dramatic in essentials and excesses (I) and the historian goes about showing how the films (W) reveal this commitment to audiences.

A more sophisticated approach will not do away with the idea that Bresson occupied preliminary stances - which he did - but rather uncover the modifications or refinements his intentions underwent during the creative process. For Baxandall, when an artist makes a picture or a filmmaker makes a movie 'Ttlhere is not just an intention but a numberless sequence of developing moments of intention - 11---+ e---+ e ---+ .... "12 But tracking the making of a painting brushstroke by brushstroke or a movie take by take is neither possible nor entirely desirable. A chronicle of on-the-set decision-making does not yield an explanation. Instead, one attempts to situate how preliminary intentions are refined or revised once the camera or brush is picked up.

In the intentional flux model, explaining authorial styles involves following a manageable intentional sequence - from the development of initiating intentions (or as I will call them, precompositional commitments, or PC) through the problems (PR) that atise during a production to the solutions (S) a director and his collaborators innovate (or, what we could call the "work"):

PC ---+ PR ---+ S

The precompositional commitments are but the first intentional phase; in order for them to give rise to fine-grained aspects of the works, they have to become part of a dynamic sequence of intentions, to be translated into concrete intentions (or problems) worked out during the production.

In other words, the historian who accepts the statement "This Pickpocket elliptical episode comes directly from the author's narrative theory" as one that fully explains this multi-shot, Paris-England sequence leaves much of the explanatory detective work incomplete. Many of the salient elements that distinguish this particular

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Figure 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 A Bressonian ellipsis in Pickpocket, Agnes Delahaie Productions, 1959.

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ellipsis from others in Bresson's oeuvre remain unaccounted for. To draw closer to the sequence - to develop a description with greater ostensive force that accounts for the scene's voice-over narration, the leftward and then rightward staging of Martin Lasalle, the striking consistency of Michel's attire despite the two-year gap, and so forth - one must reconstruct the problem situation that Bresson and his crew faced in bringing his elliptical narrative theory to the screen. The elliptical sequence does not reduce to one initiating intention; rather, the sequence's specific qualities depend upon a flux of intentions, a shift from a general intention to use ellipses to at least two very different intentional events related to shooting this specific scene:

1. a precompositional commitment; 2. the intentions involved in identifying the artistic problems this commitment

causes when shooting a given scene from a script, and; 3. the intentions involved in producing solutions to these problems.

Moreover, these events may well subdivide into discrete micro-events involving a web of additional intentions that all have a history: (I) will potentially include (a) the origins of this articulation of the commitment in a previous production, (b) the presentation of it to the press before a new production, (c) the presentation of it to collaborators during a production, and so on. The problem and solution phases of the intentional sequence in (2) and (3) might "disperse" as well into such micro-events as Ca) the recognition of a problem by the author himself, (b) refinements to the problem as the author consults with creative persolU1el, (c) the experimentation with a range of solutions during tests in the preproduction stage, etc.

The implications of the intentional flux model are sinnple enough to grasp. With this tool, the student of film and media can avoid hasty assumptions about an author's initiating intentions, their stability, and how they factor into the making of films. The process of explaining and appreciating works - from the French auteur Jean-Luc Godard's thesis about the death of cinema in Histoire(s) du cinemaIHistory(ies) of the Cinenut (1988-98) to the producer and director Frank Darabont's experiment to translate the post-apocalyptic zombie genre to serial television in The Walking Dead C2010- ) - involves gathering evidence about initiating ideas for a project and the commitments and principles the authors hold, and about how these ideas and commitments morphed into the problems the authors intended to solve during production. This approach allows for a fuller, richer appreciation of the artistry involved, of the mobiliry and flUidity of intentions that actually characterize the activities of authors and their teams, of the networks of shared responsibility and the complexities of collective effort that often go unnoticed in accounts of author's oeuvres, and, perhaps most importantly, of the finer-grained aspects of the works themselves.

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The intentional story we have told about Bresson's ellipses is a fairly simple and hypothetical one. Let us now consider a complex case that involves the dynamics of creative collaboration between Bresson and his crew. As we will see, the intentional flux model allows us to discover the sources for even the finest aspects of an author's style - aspects that the standard, static model of authorship intentionality tends to overlook.

Preliminary Stances: Bresson's Precompositional Commitment to Visual Austerity

Authors often use interviews with the press to express the broad intentions of their art. Many of Bresson's intentions were expressly fonnal, one might even say theoretical. He explains how he develops his "theoties" about cinema in a 1962 interview:

Some view me as a theoretician. It is perfectly true that, given the complexity of film, I view it as profitable to reflect on one I've just completed in order to try to understand why I was successful with onc thing and failed with another.

If these reflections give birth to theories, it is because they help me feel free - I feel free precisely because these theories exist- 13

These " theories" helped Bresson track his own artistic development and secure a sense of his personal freedom of choice, and as a result, they help the historian understand the development of his style.

One of Bresson's intentions - one of his precompositional commitments - was to a cinema stripped of spectacle, that is, Visually austere. That he wanted to show that cinema would benefit from a subtler, more restrained approach is clear from his 13S-page book of filmmaking aphorisms, Notes on the Cinematographer, published in 1975. Quite striking are the aphOrisms that declare an aversion to cinematography whose showy qualities stress specific shots and meanings within them:

Apply myself to insignificant (nonsignificant) images. 14

Flatten my images (as if ironing them), without attenuating them. 15

Images and sounds must sustain one another. No independent images or sounds. 16

Not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images and photography 17

The advocate of the standard approach to authorship intentionality, perhaps feeling that these are the ultimate motives behind Bresson's photographic choices, might now take up the films and look for evidence that the author "expressed" these

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commitments in them. But for one who is sensitive to shifts in authorial inten-tionality, the fact that these aphotisms were published in 1975 should raise doubts about their usefulness in explaining the decisions made on projects completed in the 1950s, for instance . When did Bresson formulate these views - before, duting or after his 1950s filmmaking? Tracking an author's intentional flux involves paying dose attention to the precise sequence of mental events. Books and interviews that appear decades after the films one wishes to explain do not provide the best source of evidence for the intentions that inspired a project.

During the 1940s and early 1950s, Bresson regularly stated a preference for simplified uniformity in film style. His first two features - Les anges du piche/The Angels of Sin (1943) and Les dames du bois de Boulogne!The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945) - were studio productions made in the challenging conditions of the German Occupation, where, among other things, Parisian filmmakers had to deal with sudden changes in personnel and long production schedules due to power outages. After making these films, he took the opportunity to "theorize" about what he had accomplished. In a 1946 interview, he positioned his conception of cinema against the status quo: "In cinema, there is a prejudice against simplicity. Every time someone breaks with that prejudice, the effect is deeply moving."!8 Recent technological developments -like color cinematography - are seen by Bresson as impediments to simplicity:

The problem of color isn't a problem of COIOf. It is something else entirely. It matters little whether a film's color is good or bad. One can always find a good way of using a bad tool, on the condition that one realizes that it is a bad tool. This is what distinguishes a good craftsman from the bad ones: the good craftsman knows how to choose his tools, and often chooses the bad ones. But this isn't the problem. The problem lies in color's power to charm; its dispersive, distracting power prevents its use in drama and tragedy at the moment.19

These statements are a subtle fonn of authorial branding in which Bresson comments on other filmmakers and technologies in order to associate his works with specific values and commitments. For the Robert Bresson of 1946, tech-niques that dazzle the viewer's eye ignore those more effective, ultimately minimal, means by which a character's drama can be told to an audience. Spectacle inter-feres with the filmmaker's aim to discover what he calls the "interior necessity" of the drama and the subtle play of relations that is for Bresson the true art of cinema:

A film is above all else relations, because the subtlety [of cinema] - it's in the relations that one must find it. Relations between actors, between actors and the objects and decor that surrounds them, between the action and the rhythm of images, etc.20

Bresson's conception of cinema is rather complex, but for our purposes what is important is his aesthetic commitment to Simplification, or the rejection of

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techniques that " disperse" or make "distracting" those component parts used to create rhythms and relations between shots.

After making public his commitment to simplified stylistics and stotytelling, he rook a step further in explicating his anti-spectacle "mission": images can serve such an aesthetic only when they are treated uniformly - when they are stripped of striking compositional elements that draw attention to individual shots rather than the relations between them. By 1951, after the release of his first postwar film, Journal d'un cure de campagne, he argued that if individual images are going to create rhythmiC or relational effects, they must develop "an exchange value."" This cannot be accomplished, so he thought, if individual images stand apart from the rest. Images must instead have "something in common" - they must "participate together in a kind of union.""

Simplified neutrality was not a passing interest for the director. By the mid-1950s Bresson had shifted his promotional rhetoric to state a commitment to a deglamorized, anti-theatrical style of realist filmmaking. He was now explicitly critical of contemporary popular cinema, and presented his commitments as a viable alternative. In 1955, he tells the students of the I.D.H.E.C. (the Parisian film production school):

The cinema we see until now isn't cinema, but, and without exception, photographed theater, where the means of expression are theatrical- that is, the means of actors, with impersonations, gestures. Cinema, if it wants to be cinema, has to absolutely abolish all theatrical expression, including the expression of actors. From the moment the expression is theatrical, no room is left for cinematic expression. Images must possess a quality, a neutrality indispensible to the exchange that goes on between images, for a film is made not just of images, but of links, of relations of images, the same way a color lacks value on its own, accruing it only in its relation to another. z3

In 1957, after completing his second postwar work, the prison break film Un condanme a. mort s'est echappe/ A Man Escaped (1956), he criticizes the current state of the French industry, which presents too many batriers to artistic liberty: 'The obstacles we encounter are insurmountable. We are less and less free (capital, routine, stars). The current formula (of screenwriters, adapters, dialogue writers and directors at odds with one another) blocks all the routes."" His criticism of cinema's commercialization includes a dismissal of those who view cinema as «a means of reproduction (photographed theater) rather than a means of expression."25 If cinema is used only to capture and transmit the image of a star, then it cannot be a personal art. He is just as critical of filmmakers who offer a "realist" alternative that, like Orson Welles ornate decors, visual effects, and wide-angle lenses in Citizen Kane (1941) or The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), is just as showy: "my hope is that my sets and costumes will go unnoticed. [ . . . J For me, realism is not an end, but a means."" Individual images whose pictorial qualities catch the viewer's eye render the relations between images impossible. As he puts it to the historian

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Georges Sadoul in 1962, "[ilf you want the electricity to pass, you must strip the wires. HZ7

Relying solely on his 1975 text, Notes on the Cinematographer, we might have been tempted to apply his ideas about visual austerity retroactively - to assume that because Bresson is an auteur with a consistent "worldview" these ideas motivated his style throughout his entire career. Instead, we discovered that although Bresson wielded a lexicon different from the one he preferred in his 1975 aphorisms - he preferred words like "simplicity," "union," and "neutrality" in the 1940s and 1950s and "nonSignificant," "flattened," and "necessaty" in 1975 - the underlying intuition to strip his images of excesses proved to be more or less consistent.

How, then, did his consistent precompositional commitment to visual austerity drive his film practice, if at all? Once again, the intentional flux model accepts few assumptions about the relations between distinct intentional moments and phases in artistic practice. They must be tracked.

Bresson and Burel: Problems and Solutions in "Stripping the Wires"

Throughout the period in which he evolved a commitment to "stripping the wires" - to paring his images of glitzy or theatrical excesses - Bresson worked with the renowned cinematographer Leanee-Henri Burel, perhaps most famous for his work on Abel Gance's films Mater Dolorosa/The Torture of Silence (1917), La roue/The Wheel (1923), and Napoleon (I927). An advocate of the standard approach to authorial intentionality might view the step we take in this section superfluous. After all, we have already demonstrated that Bresson aimed to make films that seek simplicity or a union among its images, or that eschew showy effects. By adding another agent's intentions to OUf explanation, do we not risk complicating matters or relieving the author ofms control over the tina1 work?

The problem is by now clear: precompositional commitments - or Bresson's "theories" - are not the whole stoty. They only reveal part of Bresson's devel-opment as an author. In order for precompositional commitments to be of any use in our detective work of explaining the look of an individual film, they must be examined in light of the artistic practices - the subsequent intentions - they motivate.

Consider for instance if a Bresson admirer were to claim that his films - let us say, Journal d'un cure de campagne - are a product of his preliminaty stances or theories alone, in this case about the excesses of conventional cinema and his related commitment to an anti-spectacle alternative. Such an admirer would be at pains to explain any number of Journal d'un cure de campagne's salient effects. The notion that his films simply and consistently expressed his commitment to visual austerity might lead one to ignore an aspect of the film's look that does not fold so easily into the idea of austerity: the film's pictorialist visual style. Pictorialism,

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a style of photography that emerged in the 1910s, uses lens and lamp diffusion in the form of gauzes and scrims, as well as developing techniques, to soften and thereby "aestheticize" the photographic image and make it worthy of the status oflegitimate art. In film hiStory, pictorialism made its way into German and then Hollywood filmmaking in the so-called "soft style" of the 1920s.28 Eventually, this approach came to be associated with glamorous dose-up shots of female stars. Remarkably, we see evidence of this style in Journal d'un cure de campagne (see Figures 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6).

As a result of the photographic choices made by Bresson and Burel, the background candles shimmer (Figure 6.4), the light flowing into the titular priest's (Claude Laydu) apartment from a dormer window "bleeds" onto the surrounding frame (Figure 6.5), and the contour lines of a twisting expreSSionist-style tree blur (Figure 6.6). Examined in isolation, these decisions seem to render the images of the story's poor and suffering country priest rather silky and delicate. The contrast berween the priest's modest attire and abode and the ethereal quality of the photography is almost distracting in that the beauty of individual shots draws our attention - an impulse that goes against the grain of Bresson's precompositional commitment to simplified, uniform imagery that is useful or neutral rather than beautiful. Is the Bresson admirer forced to recognize a contradiction in the auteur's art at this stage?

In the lead-up to Journal d'un cure de campagne, Bresson's notion of visual austerity involved denouncing color cinematography as distracting; but, as far as we know, he did not see the same potential in "soft-style" effects. As such, his precompositional commitments, as he articulated them in the 1940s and early 1950s, were not incompatible with pictorialist techniques. Bresson was open to experimentation.

The artistic problem of creating Journal d'un cure de campagne's look can be inferred from production circumstances. The film is based on a 1936 Georges Bemanos novel of the same name. As the novel's title suggests, the priest recounts in diary form the events of his life. With a few exceptions, every plot development in the novel is filtered through the private thoughts of the protagonist. We learn of his arrival at a new parish, his attempts to improve the lives of his parishioners, the advice shared with him by more experienced priests, his increasing isolation from the village'S influential count and countess, the difficulties he has praying, and his terminal illness all through the point of view of the young cure. As I have shown elsewhere, a number of conditions encouraged Bresson to follow the novel to the letter - to make as faithful an adaptation as possible in the approximately rwO hours of screen time the French exhibition market would permit him. 29

The problem before Bresson and his crew can be posed as a question: how can the novel's first-person form be translated onto the screen without using the florid techniques of conventional cinema? Bresson's aversion to showy compositional strategies meant that punctuating the film with ornately choreographed subjective point of view shots or overt dream or hallucination sequences as the priest's

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Figure 6.4,6.5, and 6.6 Delicate pictorialist effects inJournal d'un cure de campagne, Union Generale Cinematographique, 1951.

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mental and physical health deteriorated was out of the question. After all, he was looking to experiment with the artistic potential of unifonn neutrality. The problem Bresson and his cinematographer faced involved rendering the priest's subjectivity through sparse and uniform means.

Adherents to the intentional flux model will not be surprised to learn that Bresson did not know how to answer this problem as the film entered the preproduction phase. His agency under the circumstances was that of an artist in search not of personal expression but of concrete solutions. And we know from the memoir of his cinematographer Burel that in practice the author's precompositionai commitments did not function as completed blueprints for the final film but rather as broad notions of where their artistic experiments might lead. Burel shares his first-hand experience of an initial encounter with the auteur:

I arrived in Paris. Bresson and I had breakfast [ ... ] and he brought me to see a film, The Third Mati [Reed, 1949], indicating to me: "You see, this is the kind of thing I'd like to do," The cinematography was extremely hard and conrrasty. I shared with him my astonishment that he wanted this kind of cinematography for Cure: this violence. these harsh whites. didn't seem to suit the story. Still, I promised him to do tests in this vein ifhe wanted me to. [ ... ] We then dined and spent the evening together discussing this; he told me that the idea was to develop a photography that was almost blurry. very diffused, very reserved, very flat, without contrast. I brought to his attention the fact that this was the exact opposite of the film we had seen! Perhaps he had thought it over in the interim [ . . . ] he's very resourceful!30

While Bresson never prOVided his side of the story, we also have no substantive reason to doubt Burel's version of these events. In fact, because he is an industry craftsman and not a cinephile enthralled with Bresson's authorial reputation, Burel's point of view is just what we are looking for: he is invested more in recounting the practical development of decisions taken, and this makes him a reliable witness to Bresson's intentional flux.

Particularly insightful is Burel's account of the next day, when he and Bresson decided on the appropriate techniques (some of which are pictorialist in nature) to render Journal d'un cure de campagne's images flat and soft. They were looking to avoid sharp contrasts while still maintaining a wide tonal range between the brightest highlights and darkest shadows in the frame. Burel did not have his usual production team with him in Paris to conduct the tests Bresson requested. so he worked with a camera operator and an assistant furnished by the studio. He decided on a lens for the film, and performed experiments. An author's works are sometimes shaped by the agency of collaborators, and by happenstance:

.. . when Bresson asked me what kind oflens I was going to use, I said I was thinking of 50mm. It doesn't give you much depth, which he evidently didn't want anyway, and it concentrates the action. I also told him I would use relatively powerful diffusers in order to get the extreme contrasts he liked. Now, I had brought along my own diffusers which were made especially for me and which were in effect cylindrical lens

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additions. We shot various tests using 50 and 75mm lenses. But the man who was acting as my assistant wasn't used to these diffusers and he must have changed them while changing lenses, getting them on back to front. When I saw the rushes I was appalled; it wasn't diffused, it was out of focus. At which point Bresson came rushing up excitedly, saying, "That's it! You've got it, my dear Burel. That's exactly what I want for my film."31

In the end, what we see in the film is the result of an exchange of intentions; Burel continues:

I like diffused effects and I don't like high definition, but I wasn't going to make a film that was entirely out of focus. However, we lunched, we talked, we looked at those rushes over and over again. Finally, he said that perhaps we could compromise, meet each other halfway over what he wanted and what I refused to do. [ ... J SO I shot the whole film with a 50mm lens, and in addition to the diffuser, used a very light gauze. But since Bresson was making demands on me, I also made demands on him. I told him I saw the film entirely without luminous contrasts, as something rather insubstantial or immaterial which I wanted to handle without any suggestion of shadows. All tight, he said, but how? Since he had the budget to do it, and since there usually isn't much sun in the north anyway (the film was shot entirely on location in the Pas-de-Calais), I suggested that we should shoot without sun, doing the exact opposite of what everybody usually does and shooting indoors when the sun did come out. That way I thought we could give the film a texture, a style, an entirely new feel. 32

Bresson and Burel shot the film almost entirely before dawn, and Burel ultimately praised the author for the direction he was given: "his idea to make a film with heavy contrasts but also heavy diffusion (diffusion usually thwarts contrast - if you diffuse a lot, you need high contrast lighting or else the image will have no volume) was a good one. It made for a very special photography.""

Let us consider Bresson's intentional flux for Journal d'un cure de campagne schematically:

The Author's Precompositional Commitment (PC)

Visual austeriry (as simplified uniformiry)

An Artistic Problem this Commitment Posed (PR)

Maintaining austere uniformiry while telling a story from the protagonist's POV

A Solution Innovated in Collaborative Practice (8)

Consistent use of pictorialist techniques across the entire film

Hidden HantLs at Work 127

With this, we arrive at an explanation and description of the look of Journal d'un cure de campagne that is much richer than one that simply posits the film as a perfect manifestation of Bresson's original intentional stance. We needed to explore Bresson's preliminary stance in light of the flux of his intentions. Burel's intentions also entered the mix; his expertise provided the auteur with the concrete means to translate an Original intention to commit to simplified unifonnity into an intention to use pictorialist effects - an intention Bresson had while working on the project. If considered in isolation, the film's shots may have potentially distracting, beautiful qualities, but Burel's consistent use of the 50mm lens, his patented lens diffuser and a light gauze, and his recommendation that the film be entirely shot in low-lighting conditions, resulted in a look that made this subtle beauty common to virtually every take. Bresson and Burel discovered solutions that created the sort of union between images that the author discussed in his promotional rhetoric for the film. These solutions also fulfilled the objective of communicating to viewers that this story of a country priest's spiritual struggle with the outside world is being told from the consistent point of view - through the eyes - of a character whose isolation results in a rather restricted understanding of the circumstances around him. Pictorialist solutions that limit spatial depth and render details in the images opaque express the inner life of a character embroiled in spiritual struggle.

Conclusion: The Intentional Flux Model at the Intersection of Film and Media Studies

Mysteries are ofren thought to lie at the source of art. Some believe that at the origins of a work one discovers the inscrutable complexities of inspiration. But this chapter has argued for a more useful approach that tracks the flux of an author's practical intentions. Suggested by Michael Baxandall, the intentional flux model pulls the study of authorship in the direction of what the sociologist of art Jeremy Tanner calls a "micro-sociology of cultural practices."34 In the case of Robert Bresson, we opened up our field of inquiry to include the dynamic within an author's intentions, and examined it in the context of an exchange of agencies between the author and his creative personnel. This node of evolving artistic intentions and practices proved to be a salient proximate factor in the development of his visual style.

What this suggests is that to understand an author's art, we must track the flow of concrete intentions; and in doing so, our explanations should consider the hidden hands at work in an oeuvre attributed to the individual sensibility at the helm. This alternative to the standard, static approach to authorial intentionality could prove to be a boon for the student of film and media if it is directed at answering some old and new questions in authorship studies, specifically as they relate to historical explanation.

128 Colin Burnett

Looking beyond cinema, television and videogame scholars in particular have often expressed concern over the very idea of authorship, because as an analytical and explanatoty model it appears to apply with difficulty, or not at all, to these highly collaborative, popular arts. The television scholar Jeremy Butler expresses this view when he explains how the" debunked auteur theory" is problematic for an "elitism" that prescribes a "Byronic auteur" whose style is valuable only because "it is the expression of the auteur's vision."" He objects that television is "[m]uch like a medieval cathedral," because it is often "the product of dozens of workers' efforts. "36 Espen Aarseth doubts that games can conSistently be studied for the messages their ostensible authors express, arguing that in the case of Sim City (1989) or The Sims (2000) - by the independent game maker Will Wright - "the players are given a playground and some tools, a set of rules and the freedom to construct fairly open structures, situations and objects. There are no explicit messages or objectives dominating gameplay."" On top of eschewing particular messages or a unified vision, even the most independent game makers would acknowledge that "they are in the grip of a powerful industrial system, where the vision of the individual has little weight, and where big decisions are taken in board rooms, not in the game design studios. "38 Highly collaborative, closed to or not used for personal expression, subject to the whims of an industrial system that makes the art possible - television producing, writing, or directing and game making do not appear to be good candidates for the study of authorial intentionality.

However, an implication of the intentional flux model is that students of film and media can disentangle two aspects of authorship. On the one hand, one can study the development of an individual reputation to which a work or series of works is attributed (usually in order to legitimize a medium or the artist at the helm). On the other, one can study what I have called the hidden hands at work - the mental and physical events in the inventive process and collaborative practice of a figure positioned as an author by a viewing or gaming community. The first explores the relevant discourses of authorship and the effects they have on the perception of the medium or on an individual's continued ability to work within a marketplace; the second explores how the preliminary stances that define an author motivate artistic decisions once creative work is begun.

Ultimately, the intentional flux model recommends that film and media scholars pursue a number of avenues of study that will undoubtedly alter our understanding of authors. Among these, it recommends conceiving of authors as creative "managers" in order to refine our sense of the flow of practical intentions between authors and their teams. One need not view the television or gan1e auteur as a Byronic individualist seeking pure self-expression; rather, in the context of artistic production, authors can be studied for the ways that they communicate with and focus the problem-solving of their teams. For instance, we might classify the author-collaborator dynamic we observed between Bresson and Burel, and others

Hidden Hands at Work

Collaborative creation

Downward communication from <}===.:;;;;;;;={!=",;;;;;;---c>

author to crew

Individualist creation

Figure 6.7 Authorial management styles.

Horizontal communication

between author and crew

129

like it in game and television production, along axes of communication style and degrees of individual and collective creativity.

Bresson managed his precompositional commitments and Burel's agency pater-nalistically: the style of Journal d'un cure de campagne was the result of Bresson positing a goal for Burel and then collaborating with the cinematographer to develop a solution. An author might also be autocratic, communicating commit-ments and preferred solutions downward to a team that simply executes them as ordered; democratic, in which precompositional commitments as well as the solutions for a work are arrived at collectively; or laissezlaire. in which every Significant member of a team, including the director, teleplay writer, cinematog-rapher, and editor communicate «horizontally" as relative equals but work in a highly individualistic manner on their own areas of production. Examining how these artistic managetial styles apply to the televisual and media arts, and why certain managerial approaches are more common than others in certain arts or in specific periods, would further nuance our sense of authorial agency in these popular, collaborative forms.

By addressing a major methodological blockage of media and television schol-arship and promoting the study of the group dynamiCS that exist between authors and their crews, the intentional flux model also seeks to refine our sense of the preliminary stances authors can hold. As we briefly saw with videogame author-ship, many students offilm and media assume that authorship by definition entails the use of a medium to express a preformed message. If the viewer can detect this message, then the director, showrunner, or game maker is a candidate for authorship.

Indeed, the showrunner David Simon makes this assumption when he describes the preliminary stance he and his co-creator, Eric Overmyer, shared for the

130 Colin Burnett

HBO series Treme (2010- ). One of the initiaring ideas behind the series was to communicate to viewers the cultural distinctiveness of New Orleans:

[New Orleans] was one of the last authentic places in America. It was different from anywhere else, and so nourished a distinct culture. And we wanted to make a show that w as about the meaning of culture. Culture's a very subtle and nuanced thing that doesn't always present itself the way it does in New Orleans. [ ... ] What it says about who we are as Americans and what makes us distinct,J9

Like many showrunners and filmmakers, Simon views his work as the expression of a cultural message - «about New Orleans." But what of the other commitments and problems that drive the artistry of film directors, showrunners, and game makers - related to storytelling (serial or episodic), visual design, and the creative agencies of their collaborative personnel? Simon points to the limitations of viewing a television show as the expression of an author's message: "the problem is [ ... J if I could tell you what the show is about, then there's no need to do the show. I have to do the show to show yoU."40 Like a Bresson film, it cannot be assumed in advance that the expression of a political or cultural message on its own explains Treme. To assume so would involve leaving aside what it means to "do the show" - those visual, acoustic, and storytelling solutions that only a fully developed explanation will account for.

In this way, tracking the intentional flux of an author liberates the student of film and media from the simplistic "preliminary stance / preformed message = final work" approach to authorship. To the extent that the intentional flux model remains open to forms of authorial artistry that do not entail the expression of messages, it can help us expand the range of initiating commitments and stances we attribute to film and media authors. An author's flux of intentions will often begin with a complex of commitments and stances accepted prior to production:

1. authorial management - how an author will communicate his or her inten-tions to a team and coordinate its artistic activities;

2. message expression - how an author intends to use his or her works to communicate a social, political, cultural. historical, or theoretical "point," "thesis," or "argument";

3. formal or generic allegiance or experimentation - how an author intends to use his or her works to create effects that display an allegiance to a given storytelling, stylistic. or generic form, or that pursue experimentation on these levels.

These three rypes of stance or commitment - regarding an author·s managerial approach, the messages an author wishes to convey, and the form or genre that guides the author's inventive process - will not hold equal importance for every author. Some authors will, like Bresson during Journal d'un cure de campagne, be

Hidden Hands at Work 131

less concerned with communicating a political message than with formal and narrative experimentation. Determining the nature of the initiating stance or commitment of an author is a crucial step, for it conditions our understanding of the flow of artistic intentions that follows, and the works that result.

Notes

The distinction between "works" and "texts" is worth pondering in the context of creative entities like films and television episodes. A "text," strictly speaking, is comprised of words, written or spoken. When applied to an entire film or television episode, it is used as a literary or linguistic metaphor, for not all the aspects accounted for in a film or show reduce to language (the dialogue on the soundtrack and written intertitles or signs are exceptions). As the philosopher Paisley Livingston argues, films are more accurately described as "audio-visual displays"; see his "On the Appreciation of Cinematic Adaptations," Projections 4.2 (Winter 2010),104-27. Others have picked up on the term as well; see Carl Planringa, "Emotion and Affect," in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantings (New York: Routledge. 2009). 93. Films and shows are intricate networks of audiovisual stimuli; their pleasures and functions are not merely "texrual."

For our purposes, the term "work" will suffice. A work, as I conceive it, is a concrete artifact that is the product of intentional creative activity. From a conceptual standpoint, "work" is preferable to "text" because (1) "work" connotes the tangible yield of practice and (2) a work is logically prior to a text, in the sense that texts are entities commentators construct as they make sense of the works created by artists and producers. And it is the latter (the practice of artists and producers) rather than the former (the symptomatic interpretation of a work) that interests us here.

2 Noel Carroll, On Crihcism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 66. 3 Carroll, On Criticism, 68. 4 Alvin J. Goldman, Simu!ahng Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of

Mindreading (New York: Oxford UniverSity Press, 2006). 5 W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy,'· in W.K.

Wimsatt, Jr. , The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaningof Poetry (London: Methuen, 1970), 2-18.

6 David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 40.

7 Ivan SoU, "On the Death of the Author: A Premature. Postmodem Postmortem," The Dialogue, Yearbook of Philosophical Henneneutics 2 (2002), 151 -2.

8 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (London: Yale University Press, 1985), 63.

9 Baxandall, Patterns, 63. 10 Baxandall, Patterns, 63. 11 Jean-Louis Provoyeur, Le cinema de Robert Bresson: De l'effit reel al'effet de sublime (Paris:

L'Harmattan, 2003). 12 Baxandall, Patterns, 63. 13 Georges Sadoul, "Robert Bresson a Georges Sadoul: 'Si ron veut que passe Ie courant

electrique. il faut denuder les fils ... ,'" Les lettresfranfaises. March 7,1963,9.

132 Colin Burnett

14 Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997), 21. Originally published as Notes sur Ie cinematographe (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

15 Bresson, Notes, 22, original emphases. 16 Bresson, NOles, 83, original emphasis. 17 Bresson. Notes. 92. 18 Jean Queval, "Dialogue avec Robert Bresson," L'ecranfratl.{ais 72.12 (November 1946),

12, original emphases. 19 Queval, "Dialogue," original emphases. 20 Queval, "Dialogue," original emphases. 21 Hommage a Georges Bernanos et debat sur Ie film "Journal d'un cure de campagne" (Paris:

Centre carholique des intellecruels 1951),32. 22 Hommage a Georges Bernanos, 32, original emphases. 23 Robert Bresson, "'Une mise-en-scene n'est pas un art:' Robert Bresson rencontre les

etudiants de l'Institution des hautes etudes dnematographiques (decembre 1955)," Cahiers du cinema: Hommage Robert Bresson (February 2000), 4.

24 "Entretien avec Robert Bresson," Unifrancefilm 45 (December 1957), 1. 25 "Entretien," 1. 26 "Entretien," 2. 27 Sadoul, " Robert Bresson a Georges Sadoul," 9. 28 Kristin Thompson, "The Major Technological Developments of the 1920s," in The

Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 287- 93.

29 Colin Burnett, The Invention of Robert Bresson: Style and Taste in the French Cultural MarketplaceforCinema, 1934- 1959 (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011).

30 LH. Burel and Rene Predai, Souvenirs de L.H. Burel (Paris: Avant-scene, 1975), section BID, n.p. The Third Man was released in Paris 011 October 20, 1949. Shooting forJournal d'un cure de campagne began on March 6, 1950.

31 Rui Nogueira, "Burel & Bresson," in Robert Bresson, ed. James Quandt (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 1998), 515. ( have made slight changes to Nogueira's text based on my reading of a similar passage in Burel and Predal, Souvenirs de L.H. Burel, section BlO, n.p.

32 Nogueira, "Burel & Bresson," 515 - 16. 33 Burel and Predal, Souvenirs, section BlO, n.p. 34 Jeremy Tanner, "Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art,"

Cultural Anthropology 4.2 Guly 2010), 242. 35 Jeremy Butler, Television Style (New York: Routledge, 2010), 18. 36 Butler, Television Style, 18. 37 Espen Aarseth, "The Game and Its Name: What is a Game Auteur?," in Visual

Authorship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media, ed. Torben Grodal, Bente Larsen, and (ben Thorving Laursen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), 263-4.

38 Aarseth, "The Game," 268. 39 James Poniewozik, .. 'I Believe in Arguing: ' David Simon Treme Interview Excerpts,"

Tuned In: A Blog about Television by Time's TV Critic James Poniewozik, April 9, 2010, http: // tunedin.blogs.time.com / 20 1 a I 04 / 09 / da vid-simon-treme-interview-excerpts -and-highlights.

40 Poniewozik, "I Believe."