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Welcome to Filmmaker IQ.com, my name is John Hess and today we’ll look at the origins
and implications of auteur theory while systematically butchering pronunciation of several French words.
Simply put - the Auteur Theory holds that a film is a reflection of the personal creative
vision of the director - that he or she is the author of the film like a writer is the author
of a novel. The natural line of thinking from this in film criticism is that a film’s
quality is tightly intertwined
with the film director. As Truffaut said, “There are no good and bad movies, only
good and bad directors”
But to really understand the impact of this idea which doesn’t seem all that controversial
on the surface especially in today’s media environment, we must consider it in a historical
context. And to do that we must look at early 20th century French cinema.
France has always had a special place in filmmaking history - from the first public film exhibition
in the Grand Cafe in Paris in 1895 by the Lumiere brothers to the works of Georges Melies.
Though Hollywood and American films would quickly dominate international cinema even
in the early silent
era, the French film industry was an important artistic force through the 1920s with Paris
a major cultural center of Europe cultivating avante garde films like Un Chien Andalou by
Spanish director Luis Buñuel and coauthored by Salvador Dali - to The Passion of Joan
of Arc by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer.
The arrival of sound in French film spelled the end of this experimental avante garde.
This new technology sort of caught French filmmakers with their pants down as they had
developed sound technologies but held no patent rights. Instead the French would have to license
this technology from American and German companies which came with heavy fees.
Until Sound, most French filmmakers were small artisan operations. Sound changed that and
powerful organized Foreign studios began to move in. In 1930 Paramount opened a studio
in Joinville to make films into different languages. A year earlier in 1929, German
sound film company Tobis-Klangfilm opened studios in the Parisian suburb of Epinay.
From this Epinay studio would come one of the first internationally recognized artistic
triumphs of the sound era - Sous les toits de Paris - under the Roofs of Paris in 1930
by René Clair.
As French theaters converted to sound, Musicals and “filmed theater” became the rage adapting
literary and dramatic works for movie going audiences. The grandiose musical films would
start to see artistic pushback in 1934 with the rise of a movement called Poetic realism - those were studio
shot films with a fatalistic view of life: focusing on disappointment, bitterness and
nostalgia. Perhaps the most prominent Poetic Realist was Jean Renoir whose films enjoyed
much international success, with La Grande Illusion in 1937 being the first foreign film
to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Picture Category - then called Outstanding Production.
But war, especially a World War, disrupts everything. When the Nazis marched into Paris,
many filmmakers, including Renoir, fled. Those that stuck around continued working under
German occupation - making “escapist” films and adapting literary works under the
watchful eye of German and Vichy Censorship. British and American films were outright banned,
so French cinema took off, even more heavily reliant musicals and stage plays as a light pleasant
distraction to the grim realities of war.
When hostilities ceased, French cinema was actually quite strong and a source of national
pride - culminating in 1945’s Les Enfants du paradis- The Children of Paradise by Marcel Carne.
A National center for Cinematography was founded in 1946 to support a strong national cinema.
But when the ban on American films was lifted, Hollywood films rushed in even encouraged
in generous quotas in exchange for French luxury items in the Blum-Byrnes trade agreement
to pay off war debts, French film production went back to a pre war average of 100-120
films annually. The difference now was they were more highly organized, more polished,
and better crafted than ever before.
But the French output was lacking something in artistic quality - at least to a group
of young men who desperately wanted to be filmmakers themselves. Against this old guard
“Tradition of Quality” a new generation of outsiders - film critics - would establish
a new way of thinking about cinema as art.
The liberation of France also saw the rise of a the cinephile movement - this was a generation
of people who had grown up with film and had access to a huge library of French and American
films available at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. Their forum would be The Cahiers
du Cinema - the Cinema Notebooks - a magazine started by Andre Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
with a group of young French film critics including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol,
Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer.
One of the central principles of Cahiers, derived from Andre Bazin, is a rejection of
montage editing in favor of mise-en-scene - the long take and deep focus - allowing
the audience to take in the scene as it unfolds.
The other principle, derived from film critic Alexandre Astrucs, is the concept of camera-stylo-
an idea that a director should wield his camera like a writer uses his pen and that he need
not be hindered by traditional storytelling.
Combining these two ideas in an essay in 1954: la politiques des auteurs, Truffaut attacked
the French “Cinema of Quality” with their heavy emphasis on plot and dialogue. These
contemporary French directors, he claimed, added nothing to the script beyond pretty
pictures they were Metteur en scène - stage setters not true cinematic auteurs like Jean
Renoir and Hollywood filmmakers like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks
- directors who managed to imprint a personal style into their work. It also happened that
these auteur directors were very established masters of mise-en-scene.
To Truffaut, there could be no peaceful co-existence between the “Tradition of Quality” and
the “Cinema d’auteurs” - even the best film of the old guard would be less interesting
than the worst film of a true auteur of cinema
In his subsequent writings Truffaut would continue to attack established French commercial
cinema as lacking ambition and imagination and preventing young men from making films
without long drawn out apprenticeships. Kinda sounds familiar…
There were certainly economic barriers in place. In the early 50s, Government money was only
available to filmmakers with established track records but by the end of the decade, laws
would change to provide funding based on the quality of the submitted script regardless
of the filmmaker's track record.
By the time Truffaut made it big internationally with his 1959 film Les Quatre cents coups
(400 Blows) which turned a $75,000 budget into a $500,000 American distribution rights
deal, more private money found its way into independent French Production - establishing
the financial groundwork for the French New Wave that put many Cahiers film critics into the directors’ chair.
Ultimately Truffaut’s call for the Cinema d’auteurs may not have been a universal
plea for cinema -but a manifesto for against the French commercial films that would ultimately
lead to the French New Wave. But film critics across the Atlantic Ocean would take Truffaut’s idea and run with it.
Mid century American filmmakers didn’t exactly receive the concept of Cinema d’auteur well.
Unlike French cinema which had always been small artisan like productions, Hollywood
and the studio system was an assembly line with films produced on a large scale collaborative
effort.
But one film critic would really bring Auteurism into the American public eye - Andrew Sarris.
Sarris, writing for Film Culture, created the term Auteur Theory in his landmark essay
“Notes on The Auteur Theory in 1962”
Heavily influenced by Andre Bazin and Caheirs du Cinema, Sarris puts forth Auteur Theory
as a way to judge films by way of their director. In the essay he outlines three premises as
a series of concentric circles for determining whether a director is an auteur or not.
The first premise of auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion
of value - that is a great director must be at least a good director - at least holding
elementary skills in craft and technique.
Moving inward the second premise is a director must have a distinguishable personality that
can be seen over and over again in his body of work.
Lastly- an auteur imbues his films with an interior meaning - which is extrapolated from
the tension between between the director’s personality and the material he has to work
with.
At the time 1962, Sarris listed Ophuls, Renoir, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Ford, Welles,
Dreyer, Rosellni, Murnau, Griffith, Sternberg, Eisenstein, von Stroheim, Bunuel, Bresson,
Hawks, Lang, Flaherty, and Vigo as true auteurs of cinema - masters of film who’s body of
work must be studied to appreciate their career spanning genius.
Although much further would be written about auteur theory by film theorists and historians,
there would be a popular backlash from another famous American film critic: Pauline Kael.
Writing for Film Quarterly in 1963, Pauline Kael rips apart Sarris’s premises of auteur
theory in her essay Circles and Squares: the Joys and Sarris.
On the subject of a director needing to be competent, Kael argues that it’s pointless
distinction to make. If a film is works, who cares if the director meets some standard
of proficiency. How are we really to judge?
On the second premise of an auteur’s signature style being unmistakable in his work, Kael
asks the question, “Why?” - why is a consistent signature style across films important at
all? Why not judge a film on it’s own merit.
To Kael Ignoring a film’s quality based on the authorship indicates that you are incapable
of judging either - A film is a film, does it make it better if you have to watch all
the other works by a particular director to get the style?
Finally on the last premise, Kael argues that the auteur theory glorifies trash. A piece
of art is a medium of expression, why does it need some additional hidden meanings. There’s
subtext of course, but what really is to gain from further obscure meanings?
Instead Kael argues that we judge the artist by the movie, not the movie by the artist.
This spat between two film critics sparked off a culture war- with two seemingly ideologically
opposed camps: The Paulettes and the Sarristes
But in reality, conflict is best used to sell papers. Outside a jab back and a snarky line
here and there, there was not a lot of gunfire exchanged. Sarris himself said in 2009:
Perhaps Sarris’ greatest mistake was to call Truffaut’s politique du auteur a "theory".
The idea that there is a central figure in a film’s production whose creative vision
is translated on the screen is a easily accessible way to talk about film as works of individuals
especially after the end of the old Hollywood studio system.
But authorship in a such a collaborative medium can be tough to discern. Consider Tim Burton’s
The Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton wrote the original poem, came up with much of the
concepts and design, but he only spent 8-10 days total on set during it’s laborious
3 year production schedule because he was busy with Batman and Ed Wood. The directorial duties
fell on his friend Henry Selick who directed the film in the style of Burton. It may have
the signatures look of a Tim Burton film, but Selick was the one in charge. And Nightmare shares a lot
of similarity with Selick’s later films like James & The Giant Peach and Coraline.
It gets even more complicated with franchises. George Lucas is closely associated with Star
Wars and he did direct the first film: A New Hope. But directorial duties fell on Irving
Kurshner for The Empire Strikes Back and Richard Marquand who directed Return of the Jedi.
Many fans disappointed at the prequels point to Lucas’ over involvement - that the original
trilogy had more balanced input from his collaborators.
The fact is, filmmaking is complex: In his later years Andrew Sarris said:
Though proponents of the auteur theory weren’t the first to recognize the director’s importance
to cinematic arts, Truffaut and others placed it first and foremost above the plot and dialogue
- shaping in many ways the way we talk about films and film history. Acting, Cinematography,
Editing, music - all are ultimately in service to the director’s vision.
But some influences shine above others and an auteur doesn’t necessarily have to be the director
- it can be the writer, an actor, a producer, even the special effects artist. If you study
modern cinema, you will be hard pressed not to find at least one individual or even a
group of people whose vision and persistence were key to birthing a wonderful piece of
motion picture history. So the question is:
Why can’t that person be you?
Go out there and make something great.
I’m John Hess and I’ll see you at FilmmakerIQ.com