Allen Smithee specializes in the mediocre. He is versatile. He is
prolific. And he doesn't exist. From 1969 until 1999, Allen Smithee
was the pseudonym adopted by Hollywood directors when they wished
not to be associated with films ostensibly of their making .
Encompassing over fifty films of various stripes -- B movies,
sequels, music videos, made-for-TV movies -- Smithee's three
decades of work affords the authors of this volume a unique
opportunity to reassess the claims of auteurism, both in its
traditional guise and in the more commodified form it currently
assumes.
Sometimes treating Smithee as an auteur in much the same way
critics and scholars have treated directors as diverse as Douglas
Sirk, Abbas Kiarostami, and Quentin Tarantino, the contributors
reclaim new possibilities for auteurist filmmaking and film
studies, even as they show what an empty display it has recently
become. In accounting for this change, the essays in this volume
employ innovative theories of authorship to recapture the
subversive effect that auteurism once enjoyed. Thus the Smithee
name becomes part of a larger discussion of the economics and
history of pseudonyms in filmmaking -- notably in the blacklist of
the 1950s -- as well as an opportunity to employ Jacques Derrida's
theory of the signature to recover obscured economic and historic
contexts within Smithee's films.
Unique in its focus, innovative in its approach, Directed by
Allen Smithee argues that it is precisely through throwaway films
such as Smithee's that recent Hollywood cinema can best be
studied.
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