ABSTRACT
Mehboob Khan was an auteur, a director whose major works can be defined in terms of certain expressive styles of filmmaking. These styles were both cinematographic and discursive: a preference for particular kinds of shots, the organization of the mise-en-scènes in a special way, recognizable ways in which key themes (nationalism, honor, and so on) were dramatized. We may refer to Mehboob Khan as a controlling consciousness whose films are read as authorized products of the mind. Such an expression, however, takes us to the heart of the auteur problematic since it implies the presence in the filmic text of a creator who is equivalent to the literary author. In a literary text the author writes the text and shows, where necessary, an authorial point of view or ideology. This could be done through the detached narrator (narratorial voice), ironic undercutting or commentary, and, among other techniques, through the construction of a "character voice" with whom the author is clearly sympathetic. In none of these techniques (or even in a combination of all) is the author present as transcendent meaning because texts are intentional objects (not intended objects) that presuppose a text-reader (spectator) transaction. The reader is part of the meaning of the text and mediates between text and author. In film the transaction requires, as in literature, textual codings that are then recoded by the spectator as part of the film's design. The words of a sympathetic character and the manner in which a particular image has been constructed (the mise-en-scènes around that image are important indices) parallel the techniques of the literary text. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the nature of filmic production—linked as it is to capital, technicians, the work of the camera, the general labor of production—is such that there is no single person with quite the same control over the film that we find in a literary text. Despite Stanley Kubrick's well-known pronouncement-"One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film" ( Edmonton Journal, March 8, 1999: C3)—the conflation of writer, composer, and director is not all that simple. So where do we locate the "controlling genius" of the filmic text? An argument that I will pursue in some detail below comes from Roland Barthes (via Kaja Silverman 1988) who distinguished the author "within the body of the text" from the author "outside the text." If we consider authorial index as something within the body of the text, as in fact the corporeal of discourse, we can begin to construct a narrative theory of film where the shift is from an "auteur" (Stanley Kubrick vigorously defines him through his literary avatar) to a cinematic structure through which the controlling mind (here the director) of the work is given expression.
