his is a Teutonic spirit, attracted by bouts of ordered madness which give birth to an

infinite chain of consequences" (128). And later, "His marvelous blend of action and

morality is probably the secret of his genius" (128). On the other hand, for Rivette, the

genius of Hawks is not a major mystery to those who believe in him: "The evidence on

the screen is the proof of Hawks's genius" (126). What Rivette accomplishes here goes

beyond an analysis of Monkey Business, which is ostensibly the subject of this piece.

Instead, his essay demonstrates what Richard Routt likely means when he argues that

auteurism is more "a point of view or a critical regard' (42; original emphasis). Here, as

Rivette demonstrates, auteurism is not so much a theory as a polemical way of looking, a

way of finding evidence of the auteur's genius.1

 In his seminal piece translating the politique des auteurs for American film

criticism, Andrew Sarris made a similar observation, arguing that the most significant

identifying feature of auteurism was at the crucial third level, which was concerned with

"interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. ... It is not quite the vision

of the world a director projects, not quite his attitude toward life" (50-51). While it was

connected to these, the interior meaning was not expressed in terms of technical

competence (first level) or even worldview (second level). The interior meaning was

produced by that creative tension between the auteur and the apparatus. In fact, interior

meaning was indefinable; it was "that intangible difference between one personality and

another, all other things being equal" (Sarris 51). From Sarris's perspective, auteurism

appeared to be a quasi-mystical unearthing of that which was "imbedded in the stuff of

cinema and [could] not be rendered in non-cinematic terms" (51). Ultimately, it was this

notion of interior meaning that transformed a metteur-en-scene into an auteur, for an