Harry Potter and the Web of Authorship

Photo by Colloquium

The date on the previous post indicates that I have been rather neglecting this blog, but I hope this will function as a small gesture of atonement. A year ago, I completed a master's thesis on one of my favorite fantasy films: Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It is longer (though perhaps not too much longer) than the average blog post on this site, but I am very proud of it, and I hope someone might find it interesting.

And perhaps you might find it relevant to a lot of conversations happening now. Nearly every time a Marvel picture rolls around, people wonder about the capacity to which a franchise blockbuster can be a distinctive work in which a director expresses a personal vision. Critics like Matt Zoller Seitz and Scott Tobias have expressed misgivings about the homogeneity and lack of directorial expression that they perceive in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I enjoy nearly all of the Marvel films, love a few of them, and think Age of Ultron is one of the most interesting blockbusters in recent years, but I think I can sum up my similar misgivings by saying: the MCU hasn't had a Prisoner of Azkaban yet.

As I say in the thesis, I don't believe it would be completely accurate to call Prisoner of Azkaban an auteurist film. Even though auteurism rose out of studying studio genre pictures, it is possible that today's franchise framework does not allow a director-for-hire to make an auteurist work. However, Prisoner of Azkaban is a distinctive work of cinema that manages to fit into both the Harry Potter franchise and Alfonso Cuarón's filmography. It presents the possibility that authorship of a franchise blockbuster is not a matter of who has creative control, but is rather a negotiation, a web of authorship.

If that sounds interesting to you, I present my thesis:

The structure of a blockbuster franchise is one that suggests homogenization and broad appeal rather than idiosyncrasy and personality. In this context, the already collaborative and often corporate nature of most mainstream filmmaking sees an increase of influencing creative factors. A studio needs to make a global hit that provides a return on the investment of a large budget, armies of artisans and craftspeople work to produce images of spectacle, and there is often a need to maintain continuity with other films and fidelity to a source material. The nature of this context seems to stifle the notion of directorial authorship. As much as scholarship has complicated the romantic idea of the singular author of any artwork, it has not killed the idea of a director expressing a personal vision through a film. It is possible to see this in scholarship on a filmmaker like Alfonso Cuarón, who has attracted interest for distinctive films such as Y tu mamá también (2001) and Children of Men (2006), but whose contribution to a blockbuster franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), is mostly ignored. In works devoted to examining Cuarón’s films in depth, James Udden labels Azkaban “generic Hollywood fare” and Deborah Shaw defines it as “non-auteurist”; both make these definitions in contrast to a more conventionally auteurist work of Cuarón’s like Y tu mamá también. These views suggest a belief that Cuarón has had a strong authorial voice in creating other films, but that this voice could not be present in a Harry Potter film. Certainly a claim that Cuarón is the author of Prisoner of Azkaban would be an oversimplification, but an opposite claim would also ignore the tension among the multiplicity of creative influences on the film. Rather than simply being a case of a director imposing a vision upon material or being a servant to corporate interests, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban showcases the franchise blockbuster as a complex authorial web that serves as a site of negotiation between different authorial voices.
Read more...