Posted by Soylent Bob is People! at pentium4.msns.leh.ptd.net on January 27, 2003 at 08:39:14:
In Reply to: Are you an Autuer Mr Smith? posted by David Blythe on January 27, 2003 at 06:06:19:
Master Blythe,
Within the confines of auteur theory, the wonderful filmmaker that is Kevin Smith fails to satisfy the strict criteria for auteurship, in my opinion.
What, you ask, is MY view for the criteria for auteurship? It has to be some element, or combination of elements, within the body of work of a "filmmaker" that gives the audience extra information beyond that of the "deigesis" (the world the film creates in the mind of the audience). These "extra-deigetic" elements can be technological (ie specific camera moves) or narrative (recurring charcters whose purpose is not solely to add exposition or hasten resolution to the plot).
So, do the films of Kevin Smith point to this rigid definition of
auteurship? I wonder answer, no.
1. No pervasive non-deigetic visual style elements - What I mean by this is that outside of the exigence of the deigesis, the director does not seem to employ any specific camera moves or color schemes. You do not find a specific lighting arrangement such as Oliver Stone's penchant for overexposure to intensify the projected mood of a character, or James Cameron's seemingly endless fascination with the "technology = cold = blue" color motif.
Kevin himself quotes on his "Evening with..." disc from a Hollywood Reporter article on J&SBSB that "lack of a style" is his style. My interpretation of that comment is that an admission that unlike Kurosawa or Scorceseor even Hal Hartley, he is not interjecting visual elements into his works that do not serve the advancement of the plot to resolution.
2. The characters who do re-occur change. Had Silent Bob remained forever silent, one could make the case that Jay and Silent Bob were extra-deigetic elements. Appearing in every film, they appear at first to be extra-deigetic elements. Yet, they do not appear as visual totems that communicate upon first sight a defined, unified message that may or may not have anything to do with the plot of the film. Silent Bob's speech in Chasing Amy is offered as a direct refutation of this point. This is not Hitchcock the director inserting himself into his filmic world. This is a dynamic charcter, whose motivations are different from film to film.
So does this mean that the Askewniverse does not exist? Hardly. Is this saying Kevin does not have the cenimatic will nor wherewithal to be an auteur? No. All this is saying is that Kevin's work does not seem to contain the extra-deigetic elements that mark an auteur's "fingerprint" on his body of work.
I hope this helps.
Soylent Bob
PS I welcome rebuttals to this posit.