It is important to remember how much context matters. In cinema, in this age, when people misappropriate "auteur theory" [shudder] so badly, it's worth recalling that what made the politique a useful tool was that it understood authorship in the studio system as a battle--not mastery. Nicholas Ray was not the lord & master of his Hollywood projects, instead for the critics he played the protagonist whose strategy and tactics were inscribed onto his commercial work from the inside out. This is why auteurist practices should still be salvageable for the political & cultural left, and not remnants of romantic celebration of the Individual Genius who finds himself (sic) excused from or transcendent of "mere" politics ...
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