She claimed its director, Alfred Hitchcock, bullied and sexually assaulted her. “I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn’t tell her that there was that detail of the butter used as lubricant,” he said, arguing that he “wanted her reaction as a girl, not an actress”/ Schneider had been making this claim for years (she died in 2011) but it was only taken seriously when a 2013 interview surfaced in which Bertolucci confirmed it the general refusal to accept those facts until they were ratified by a man adds a whole new layer of unpleasantness. We know now, as viewers did not at the time of the release in 1972 of Last Tango in Paris, that Bernardo Bertolucci deliberately neglected to warn his 19-year-old star Maria Schneider about the scene in which Paul (Marlon Brando) has anal sex with her character. There are other auteur-related horror stories.

The instance of Woody Allen is slightly different: although never charged with molesting his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, the accusations – which he denies – will dog him as long as Farrow herself still insists on his guilt. The most notorious cases have been rehearsed too widely to need replaying here in any detail – Roman Polanski raping a 13-year-old girl – after he allegedly gave her quaaludes, then fleeing the US to escape sentencing Tippi Hedren claiming that Alfred Hitchcock bullied, intimidated and sexually assaulted her during the making of The Birds and Marnie. But how do we square that with the cult of the auteur? If the value of a movie can be attributed to a single film-maker, it becomes that much harder to argue that extracurricular misjudgments – and even crimes – can be expunged from what is on screen. It is one thing separating the art from the artist: reprehensible people frequently make great films, and vice versa. And it was Andrew Sarris, courier of those ideas to English-speaking readers in the early 60s, who explained that an auteur should have an “identifiable personality” and bring “interior meaning”.īut these are more than usually troubled times in the film industry, and the assumption that the director is present in every frame becomes problematic once that same director turns out to be a liability. In any other year, that statement would have sounded uncontroversial it has, after all, been integral to the notion of auteurship since it was first expounded in the late 1940s by André Bazin.

“It is the director whose indelible touch is reflected on every frame,” she said. H anding out the Oscar for best director three weeks ago, Emma Stone prefaced the award by suggesting the power and influence of that figure in the film-making process.

The auteur movie