relation between the self-promoting auteur and the self-effacing auctor. In terms of

authorship, McBride argues, "The man who often boasted 'My name is Orson Welles' is

the least anonymous of filmmakers. Not for him the self-effacing craftsmanship of the

builders of Chartres" (Actor andDirector 143). McBride is correct in that Welles's name

preceded him even before he went to Hollywood, and his name/fame would never allow

him to be the anonymous craftsman of the Chartres. But Ffor Fake is clearly not an

unambiguous celebration of authorship either. Indeed, what Welles accomplishes in that

film turns the whole notion of auteurism inside out. By playing with the boundaries

between depth and surface, fiction and reality, high art and kitsch, Welles makes fakery

another way of thinking about the role of an auteur.

 And what does all this have to do with The Stranger? I believe that by following

the conventions of the studio system too closely, the film turns those conventions inside

out. I am not arguing that that is what Welles intended to do. Indeed, the point of the

signature experiment is to step outside the bounds of artistic intentionality. But it also

allows us to avoid the opposite trap, which most critics of the film have followed by

calling The Stranger an un-auteurist film. As Derrida suggests, in the signature

experiment, "[t]he category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from

this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of

utterances" ("Signature Event Context" 326). That is to say, if the auteur theory was the

authoritative account of analyzing a director, then the signateur theory becomes the

unauthorized version.

 Let me finally propose two ways to think about The Stranger in the signateurist

context. First, using what Ray has called a "readymade research technique," we might