Auteurism

Auteurism, as theorized in the Kornbluh source, names the dominant and constitutively non-Marxist paradigm of film theory that organizes the interpretation of cinema around the category of the individual creative subject — the director as "author" whose personal vision, style, and expressive genius is held to be the generative principle of a film's meaning. Rather than attending to film as a collective, industrial, or socially mediated form — one whose material conditions of production might render it a privileged site for Marxist critique — auteurism displaces the social power of the medium onto individual genius, effectively short-circuiting any structural or political account of cinema by re-centering it on the sovereign subject.

The theoretical move Kornbluh identifies is that even the most politically inflected variant of auteurism — the symptomatic reading developed by Cahiers du Cinéma under the influence of Althusserian structuralism — failed to institutionally consolidate itself. Instead of inaugurating a rigorously Marxist film theory, this moment ceded ground to a cultural-studies/media-studies hybrid that further individualized and de-collectivized the analysis of film. Auteurism thus functions as a symptomatic concept in its own right: it marks the site where film theory's potential for structural, ideological, and collectivist critique was foreclosed, and where subjectivity — construed as authorial interiority and individual expression — was installed as the default hermeneutic category.

This concept appears in anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019 (p. 91), where it serves as the negative counterpoint against which a Marxist film theory must define itself. Its cross-references to Ideology, Interpellation, Structuralism, Subjectivity, and Symptom are all operative in precisely specifying what auteurism gets wrong — or, more precisely, what it ideologically forecloses. Auteurism is an ideological formation in the strict sense defined by the corpus: it is not merely a mistaken theory but a structural operation that produces and reproduces a certain social reality — the reality of film as an individual artistic expression — by occulting the collective, industrial, and symptomal dimensions of the medium. It interpellates the viewer into a subject-position that mirrors the supposed authorial subject: sovereign, interior, expressive, self-consistent.

In relation to Structuralism and Symptom, auteurism is positioned as the failure to follow through on the Althusserian-Lacanian insight that texts are not expressions of a subject but effects of a signifying structure traversed by contradictions. The Cahiers symptomatic reading — which would have read films against the grain for the ideological contradictions they symptomatically harbor rather than the authorial intentions they express — represents the road not taken: a Lacanian/Marxist film theory in which the symptom (as "being of truth," as the return of the repressed structural Real) replaces the auteur as the privileged object of analysis. Auteurism's triumph is thus, for Kornbluh, the triumph of a theory of Subjectivity (authorial, unified, expressive) over a theory of the subject as divided, symptomatic, and structurally determined — the very Lacanian account of subjectivity the corpus elaborates as its central theoretical commitment.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.91)

Auteurism is the idea that film can be understood as the work of an author, a creative subject expressing himself.

The phrase "creative subject expressing himself" is theoretically loaded because it posits exactly the kind of sovereign, self-present, masculine subjectivity that Lacanian and Marxist theory jointly contest: a subject who precedes and masters the signifier, rather than being constituted and divided by it. "Expressing himself" assumes interiority flowing outward — the precise inverse of interpellation's structure, where the subject is called into being from outside — and forecloses in advance any symptomatic or structural reading of the text.