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Authors of the Image: Cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Gregg Toland Evan Lieberman (bio) and Kerry Hegarty (bio) In accepting the Mexican national award for Science and Art in 1971, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa spoke of the great privilege of "translating the world through the camera," of penetrating "the heart of reality" to explore the questions of the human soul, of "telling stories, evoking history, and making history."1 This sweeping sentiment reflects one of the fundamental tenets in the study of national cinemas: the idea that filmmakers take the tensions, the conflicts, the ideals—essentially the entire culture—of their historical moment and distill it into sounds and images that reflect a particular understanding of their time and place. Much of the study of the moving image is, in fact, predicated on the basic assumption that images (in film, television, or even video games) both reflect and create a society's set of dominant values, as well as reveal the contradictions and fissures inherent in those values. It is not surprising, therefore, that questions of authorship are so important to the field. To understand the individuals responsible for constructing this feedback loop of moving image and society, these interpreters and inscribers of culture, is to understand more deeply the meanings, the messages, and the greater significance of any cinematic work. For the field of film studies, the issue of authorship has always been particularly complex, largely as a result of the complex nature of film production itself. One particular approach, the auteur theory, which argues that films should reflect an individual director's creative vision, has been so essential to the development of the discipline that, until recently, it has all but eclipsed other critical models for explaining authorial attribution.2 Without question, the centrality of the auteur theory to the field makes a certain amount of sense. Just as English has its writers and poets, and art history has its painters, sculptors, and architects, the figure of the director might seem to be the corresponding creative figure for the medium of film. Not surprisingly, the emergence of the auteur theory in the 1960s coincided with the rise of film studies as an academic discipline, for the notion of director as auteur allowed film to be studied as an art form in its own right (as the product of a singularly inspired creator) and positioned it as a field worthy of scholarly engagement (with the issue of "film style" emerging as a focus of analysis). The main critique of the auteur theory has been that, clearly, the director is not necessarily the primary creative force on a film (e.g., Allen and Gomery 88).3 In almost all instances, he or she collaborates with an array of artists in both the production and the conception of the work and is further subject to the limitations of industry norms and standards. The stylistic patterns that the auteurist approach has been [End Page 31] so useful in pointing out can therefore be more accurately attributed to multiple authors, working within distinct industrial and technological parameters, all of whose unique aesthetic visions contribute to the final cinematic product. A more precise paradigm of authorship thus would have to take into account the contribution made by the myriad artists who, in conjunction with the director, contribute to a film's overall style.4 Robert Carringer, in his book The Making of Citizen Kane, argues for this type of collaborative, industrial-based approach to film analysis by detailing the specific contributions that each of the primary artists made to the final version of "Welles's" film. He notes that Welles, being an amateur in most filmmaking matters, relied on cinematographer Gregg Toland, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, and art director Perry Ferguson for their expertise and their vision. For this reason, Carringer claims Citizen Kane to be "not only Hollywood's greatest film, but . . . also . . . Hollywood's single most successful instance of collaboration" (x), thus representing a "kind of ultimate vindication of the auteur premise" (ix). This production-based approach has been argued convincingly by a handful of other scholars as well5 but has never gained great critical traction in the field, and thus the notion of...
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