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Vision to Inspire. Any director must master formidable complexity. He must be adept at sound and camera work, a soother of egos, a cajoler of artistic talent. A great director has something more: the vision and force to make all these disparate elements fuse into an inspired whole. In The Seventh Seal, Bergman had Death lead a troupe of clowns, obedient to a will larger than their own, across the dusky horizon to oblivion. The scene, still indelible in the minds of most viewers, somehow lifts cinema into the realm of philosophy, psychology and even religion.
The ultimate accolade to an artist's consistency—in any medium—is the suffix "esque" at the end of his name. To say a film is "Felliniesque," for example, is to suggest operatic and surrealistic fantasies, or the mixture of brio and disgust with which Fellini views society. "Godardesque" implies the nervous tics and mannerisms of an artist whose creative palsy can produce intriguing collages but never a totally complete vision. "Antonioniesque" suggests the world as a chessboard, full of malignant surfaces and doomed figures. "Pennesque," "Nicholsesque," "Kubrick-esque"—the labels refuse to stick. Yet the time may not be far off when they will.
Catching Up with Theory. The director's battle with Hollywood is far from over. Recently, the associate producer of Isadora, Universal Pictures, hacked away 39 minutes without the assent of Director Karel Reisz. But for The Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger achieved total freedom. "United Artists didn't come near me," he boasts. And Paramount Pictures has granted Mike Nichols final authority over Catch-22. It is happily in the French tradition that the facts are finally catching up with the auteur theory.