I’ve procrastinated this initiative post for a very long time and was hesitant to do it because I didn’t know where to start. There are so many directions where I could take this but I have no idea where to go.

A lot of things have piqued my interest the past year and a half of studying media. More recently, I’ve had an inner conflict in regards to directors. Why are directors so important? Their names, dare I say, are the most prominent of the production crew. When a film is ‘successful’ they seem to be the most celebrated and when it flops, they seem to bear the brunt of it.

I wonder if they do as much work as I think they do. I don’t think one can really know how  much input the director has in the actors’ acting, the lighting, set design, costume, frame, and audio among other things. How much of a film’s ‘likeability’ is reliant on the direction of it versus the script/story. I can’t remember the last time I said that I hated the narrative of a film, but enjoyed the direction of it. When someone asks me who my favourite director is, I cannot answer anymore because I’m not confident I know what they’re really about.

This brings be me back to the auteur theory. I would have never imagined myself to go back to the auteur theory after studying it a bit last year, just because it seemed like common sense to know that directors ‘direct’ and that we can see their personality in their film.

The general idea of the auteur theory holds that auteur’s films will bear their ‘stamp’. An analysis of the body of their work will reveal their personal style regardless of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the script they are given. “There are no good or bad movies, only good or bad directors”. The last time I read this it was an insignificant quote to me because I didn’t read much into it, or rather I couldn’t, because I didn’t understand it to begin with. But now, I think I understand it and agree with it to an extent.

A few years ago, I discovered a Japanese director called Shunji Iwai. I watched a few of his films: Hana and Alice, All About Lily-Chou Chou, Bandage, and Rainbow Song. It turns out that he is not only a director but also a writer. Back when I watched these films, I was not yet conscious of directing, editing, or film production in general. I watched them with a free mind so I didn’t engage myself anymore than you would with any other kind of entertainment.

After revisiting his films, I found that the narratives for his films are all so different. I cannot see a major common thread in his themes, well not an obvious one anyway. His concepts are quite scattered: friendship, coming-of-age, romance, melodrama. The film that stood out to me the most was All About Lily-Chou Chou just because I can’t even remotely decide if I like the narrative/plots or not. That aside, I enjoyed everything else about it – the cinematography, music, set design, locations, editing…etc. If my understanding of Truffaut is ‘correct’,  this would be an example that embodies his quote. Even though I’m on the fence about the narrative, I still found the film to be ‘good’. And if it has anything to do with Iwai’s direction, I guess that would make him a ‘good’ director, and one that I like. (But that’s not something I can judge…)

Of course the narrative of a film is still vital, and if it’s intolerable enough even the greatest of directors may not be able to save it.