From Dana Polan, 'Auteur desire', Screening the past, 12 (2001)

When I offered an earlier version of this essay in a seminar in France, I entitled my presentation, "Le désir de l'auteur," playing on a double meaning of the phrase. On the one hand, in auteur theory, there is a drive to outline the desire of the director, his or her (but usually his) recourse to filmmaking as a way to express personal vision. The concern in auteur studies to pinpoint the primary obsessions and thematic preoccupations of this or that creator is thus an attempt to outline the director's desire. On the other hand, there is also desire for the director - the obsession of the cinephile or the film scholar to understand films as having an originary instance in the person who signs them. Here, it is important to look less at what the director wants than what the analyzing auteurist wants - namely, to classify and give distinction to films according to their directors and to master their corpuses. [1]

I have just referred to the "will of the auteurist" and I would like to posit that an analysis of the operations of this will might help us in understanding the fascination for auteurism. What does the auteurist want? In large part, I would suggest, the auteurist wants to create meaning by an imposition of will. [9]

Nonetheless, it still seems to me to be the case that Deleuze's taxonomy is finally a logic, and not a history: there are a limited array of inviolate elements (each director and the sign-function--or, in rare cases, functions--he is associated with) and then a placing of those elements into a table (a tableau) where the fact that the organization is historical is only incidental.) [12]

In auteurism, the wish for that which, to use Clifford's terms, "is opposed to modernity," manifests itself in a desire to see the auteur as creatively ignorant of the cultural history of his art. Auteurs must be non-intellectuals, visionaries who operate in freedom and purity to give their inviolate world philosophy an arena of expression but doing so in an intuitive, unreflected manner. In this respect, it might not be too extreme to suggest that in the auteur theory, the real auteurs turn out to be the auteurists rather than the directors they study. Faced with the vast anonymity and ordinariness of the mass of films that have ever been made - and in contrast to the anonymous, ordinary manner in which many people see films (the LA times reports that many average spectators go to the multiplex not having a specific film title in mind and choose once they confront the array of offerings) - the auteurist quests to have his personal vision of cinema emerge from obscurity. He struggles to impose his vision on a system of indifference (which can include, as we have seen, the indifference of the directors themselves). [13]