That is certainly true at the narrative level. But the inverse is equally true. As we have

seen, Kindler does not stay buried as Rankin. So, if Welles wins, he does so in spite of

the narrative as well as his own stated intent about wanting to make a film about the

hidden dangers of fascism. That is to say, the evidence that lies right on the surface of the

text disrupts the linear narrative by violating its own manufactured reality. The fact that

the townspeople do not see it lends a touch of the absurd to the text. And, as Truffaut

suggests of another auteurist "failure," Hitchcock's The Trouble i/ i/h Harry, "Absurdity

is above all destruction: as the film goes forward, it destroys itself, each scene being a

challenge both to logic in general and to the logic of the preceding scene" (Dixon, Early

Film Criticism 98).30 That is obviously the case with The Stranger. Influenced by his

mentor Jean Renoir, Truffaut may have regarded Welles's film as aB picture, but there is

another "letter" we can use to describe the effect of The Stranger and the role of the

auteur in it.

 In 1969, only one year after the author had officially been declared dead, Cahiers

du Cinema published an influential piece aiming to redefine the object and purpose of

film criticism. In this manifesto, "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," Jean-Louis Comolli and

Jean Narboni called for a reclassification of cinema. In place of a naive intentionality that

characterized so much of early Cahiers criticism, Comolli and Narboni proposed seven

categories, from (a) to (g), for rethinking individual films and their relationship to

ideology. The most intriguing of these alphabetized categories is (e), which describes

those films that dismantle themselves from within, in spite of the intentions of its

director. In these films, they argue, "[a]n internal criticism is taking place" (27). These

are distinct from auteurist films, where the intention for disturbing the dominant