Director's Cut

The cult of the 'director's cut' is something I've never quite understood.  In presupposing that there is only one 'true' way that a film can be completed, it is clearly part and parcel of the 'auteur' theory which posits the director as the only legitimate interpreter of everything that makes up a film.  In reality, film making is surely a collaborative art, with contributions from a wide range of artists and artisans making up the finished product.  I'm moved to make these observations after reading of another director of a comic book adaptation complaining that the released version of their film is a travesty.  In this case.it is David Ayer of Suicide Squad.  Well, having seen Suicide Squad, I can see why he wouldn't want to be associated with it - it really is pretty shit, with a near incoherent narrative, poor character development and disjointed editing which makes various sequences feel as if they have been ordered arbitrarily, with no regard for story development.  Now, I have to say that Ayer has directed several films that I've enjoyed and is clearly talented, but his comments about Suicide Squad seem to indicate a naive ignorance of the role of the director in the Hollywood studio system.  Far from being an auteur, the director is seen as a hired hand, someone brought in merely to co-ordinate the various elements which go together to make an episode in an ongoing franchise.  Films aren't artistic endeavours, they are properties whose main creative impetus resides outside of the individual project, instead lying with those shaping and directing the overall franchise.  

In these respects, it could be argued that we've come full circle from the golden years of the studios in the thirties and forties when, outside of prestige A pictures, studios relied on a steady output of programmers and B-movies, usually all parts of series, turned out on a production line.  Directors were there to supervise the 'product', to knock it out as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Despite these restrictions, some were able to imprint their films with a certain individual style.  But regardless of a director's reputation and fame, their films were frequently re-edited by the studio, often for economic reasons - James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, for instance were both edited when Universal re-released them on a double bill prior to the release of Son of Frankenstein, with the whole prologue featuring Mart Shelley, Byron, et al removed from Bride, for instance.  (The idea was to bring down the running time of the complete programme so as to be able to fit in more performances and thereby get more bums on seats).  Curiously though, I've never heard people clamouriing for the release of 'director's cuts' of such films, (to be fair, most prints of Bride currently in circulation have the prologue, but not other cuts, restored).  Hell, I'm still waiting for the Roy William Neill director's cut of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, with all the scenes of Lugosi's version of the monster talking intact.

To get back to my original point, can we really say that the director's 'vision' of a film should constitute the only legitimate final version?  After all, thee are plenty of instances of movies which have had to be salvaged by bringing in 'film doctors' after they have gone horribly wrong during production, often involving major re-shoots with different directors, based on new scripts by new writers.  (This has become increasingly common in recent years with regard to big budget films - Rogue One and Godzilla come to mind - when their original cuts don't preview well with test audiences).  Who is to say that the release versions (which are often financially hugely successful) are 'worse' or less artistically valid than the original edit delivered by the directors?  The fact is that film is an infinitely malleable form - it isn't even shot in sequence nor, increasingly, are scenes shot complete, with so much now added via CGI in post production, meaning that it has to all be stitched together in the editing room.  It isn't uncommon for the sequencing of individual scenes to change in the editing room.  Likewise, dialogue can be changed via dubbing and soundtracks added to or subtracted from.  Unlike literature, where there is usually a definitive version of the text, in film-making the script is ultimately merely a guide, subject to infinite revision, not just while it is being written, but also during both production and post production.  The situation is further complicated by the fact that, certainly at the level of schlock movies, films frequently exist in multiple release versions. Not just re-edits for re-releases and foreign language releases, but also versions that take parts of one film and cannibalise them to provide material for another.  Bearing in mind that many of these versions are supervised by the original director, (Al Adamson, for instance, was constantly reworking his films into new creations using newly shot footage), which is the 'true' director's cut?