As I recall, the French critics advanced the milder notion that films from certain forcible American directors, such as John Ford, had stylistic elements in common and could thus be considered as works bearing the stamp of an auteur, a single author, namely the director of the movie. At the time this would have been seen as a fairly radical idea to Hollywood, which used to regard directors as journeymen assigned to do jobs by film producers who regarded themselves as the ultimate authors of their movies.

But thanks in part to how American film critics took up this notion of the auteur, so-called "auteur theory" hardened into a fixed belief that movies—at least good movies, artistically important works of #cinema as opposed to routine trash—were the sole creations of their directors, the way that paintings and novels are largely the sole creations of artists and writers. This sort of "auteur theory" completely erases the collaborative, collective nature of filmmaking.

(cont'd)

I feel moderately confident in speculating that Kubrick is in fact inviting the viewer to consider just how little we actually know here. This is the guy who made Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove, both of them movies in which chains of command and incomplete or faulty communication between parties is vital to the plot. Hence I suggest that Kubrick wants this moment to be ambiguous, and thus forever unknowable to us. We will never know, and are not intended to know, whether the AE-35 unit actually failed or not.

That is NOT how the contemporary culture surrounding #cinema, a culture that's been afflicted by the same right-wing gamer-geek diseases as fandom in stuff like #comics and #scifi, likes to interpret media. The nerd-culture method is to assert that all creative works have One True Purpose, one exact set of meanings that was imposed by a sole creator imagined along the lines of "auteur culture", which was an American distortion of a concept in film criticism first promulgated by French writers such as François Truffaut. Stanley Kubrick has benefited from dubious "auteur" interpretation for many decades now.

(cont'd)