even the later approach pulls together all the films made by a director under the name of

the author.

 But what about individual films that do not conform to that author's signature?

What about those happy accidents that are not the result of an authorial agency, whether

that is a product of the creative personality or the marketing structures that define it? It

was exactly these questions that bothered Bazin, who ended his rebuttal of the politique

des auteurs by arguing for a reevaluation of the notion of auteurism itself. Rather than

focusing on this or that director, he wanted to reassess auteurism as a discourse. "This

does not mean one has to deny the role of the auteur," Bazin posited, "but simply give

him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept.

Auteur, yes, but what of?" (258).17

 This question becomes especially difficult to answer in the case of The Stranger.

Orson Welles is a good test case for Bazin's rebuttal of the politique des auteurs. He is

widely regarded as an auteur, even the auteur. That is to say, Welles is usually

considered, as Richard Macksey suggests, the "presiding model of Romantic genius, the

myth of the explosive, comprehensive talent challenging corporate power and ultimately

becoming the victim of its own genius" (2). However, partly due to the contingencies of

production over the course of his career, his oeuvre does not cohere as neatly as Alfred

Hitchcock's or Howard Hawks's. If anything, Welles seems to resemble Sontag's model

for a "corporate rather than individual authorship," which is a term she uses to consider

those photographers whose work is too diverse or inconsistent (On Photography 134).

 But even that is not an adequate explanation for Orson Welles. For not all of his

films can be praised in the name of the author. In fact, The Stranger poses exactly this