Catherine Zimmer

For probably dubious reasons, I find myself compelled to rehearse a feeble defense of Zero Dark Thirty (read: a defense of Kathryn Bigelow, director of Point Break, who for some deeply annoying reason also directed Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the CIA hunting down and killing Usama Bin Laden). Both before and in...
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I have always avoided the idea of the “auteur” in film studies—that treatment of certain directors as the structural equivalents of great novelists. Auteur criticism has inevitably privileged a masculinist and masturbatory filmmaking practice, is obsessed with an author that Barthes has revealed as dead, and is really just annoyingly French. Auteurist thought has...
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