Sir,—Mr. Benson has, no doubt unwittingly, distorted the import of my criticism of his review of Bande a Part, in his reply published in Salient for July 29. Please allow me to set the record straight.

My principal concern was with the fact that we cannot consider the work of a man like Godard in the same context as a writer for Sight and Sound or Film Quarterly, because we see so few of his films, and this fact is worthy of comment when one writes a review of the second full-length Godard feature to reach New Zealand. This is an entirely different matter from whether or not I accept the auteur theory: I wish to point out that Mr. Benson was going beyond the evidence available to us living here in a cinematic vacuum. Because he prefaced his review with a quote from Peter Brook eulogising Godard, he invited a reaction from those who. likeme. are prepared to believe that there is probably a reason for Brook's adulation. This lact does not worry Mr. Benson, who is quite happy to damn a director on the basis of one film. I suggested that Bande a Part is probably Godard's least successful film, and that we should wait till we see Breathless, Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou (the censor has prevented us from seeing Une Femme Mariee), before we pass judgment on the director. I hope this clarifies what was obviously not clear from my previous letter.

As for the auteur theory, it would be as well to make my position on this clear, so as to obviate further charges like those levelled at me by Mr. Benson. Auteur theorists have erred in applying their theory to American directors, because it is often impossible for an American director to fulfil the criteria for being an auteur. but I would maintain that very often the theory is applicable to European directors such as Godard. Fellini and Bergman.

An auteur is simply a director who has full control over the making of his film, and of course has something to say in the film. It is far more common for this to be so in Europe than in America, where the creative functions of the director are often given to other people. A film is such an enormous enterprise that it is easy to appreciate how this happens: it may be in the casting, it may be in the script, it may be in the preparation of the sound track, or even in the editing, that the decisions are taken away from the director and given to technicians, or perhaps supervised by the production staff or the producer. Orson Welles has suffered from this process: he has said that only two of his films are truly Welles films (Kane and The Trial), because all the others involved other people's work. Thus it is crazy to talk about Hawks or Dmytryk or Preminger films, as if they always exercised full control over them.

Peter Boyes

[Abbreviated.—Ed.]