In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a film reflects the director's
personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur". In spite
of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an
industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinct enough to
shine through studio interference and the collective process.
In law, the film is treated as a work of art, and the auteur, as the creator of
the film, is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law, the
film director is considered the author or one of the authors of a film, largely
as a result of the influence of auteur theory.
Auteur theory has influenced film criticism since 1954, when it was
advocated by film director and critic François Truffaut. This method of film
analysis was originally associated with the French New Wave and the film critics
who wrote for the French film review periodical Cahiers du Cinéma. Auteur
theory was developed a few years later in the United States through the
writings of The Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris. Sarris used auteur theory
as a way to further the analysis of what he defines as serious work through the
study of respected directors and their films.
Origin Auteur theory draws on the work of a
group of cinema enthusiasts who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma and argued that
films should reflect a director's personal vision. They championed
filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Nicholas Ray, Erich von
Stroheim, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Jean Renoir as absolute
"auteurs" of their films. Although André Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers,
provided a forum for auteurism to flourish, he explained his concern about
its excesses in his article "On the Auteur Theory". Another element of
auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or
"camera-pen", which encourages directors to wield cameras as writers use pens and
to guard against the hindrances of traditional storytelling.
Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that movie-making was an
industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for,
encouraging the director to use the commercial apparatus as a writer uses a
pen, and, through the mise en scène, imprint his or her vision on the work.
Recognizing the difficulty of reaching this ideal, they valued the work of
directors who came close. The definition of an auteur has been
debated since the 1940s. André Bazin and Roger Leenhardt presented the theory
that it is the director that brings the film to life and uses the film to
express their thoughts and feelings about the subject matter as well as a
worldview as an auteur. An auteur can use lighting, camerawork, staging and
editing to add to their vision. Truffaut's development
In his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français", François Truffaut
coined the phrase "la politique des Auteurs", asserting that the worst of
Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting than the best of the
movies of Jean Delannoy. "Politique" might very well be translated as
"policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to value and look at
films in a certain way. One might see it as the policy of treating any director
that uses a personal style or a unique worldview as an Auteur. Truffaut
criticized the Cinema of Quality as "Scenarists' films", which are works
that lack originality and rely on literary classics. According to
Truffaut, this means that the director is only a metteur en scene, a "stager".
This tradition suggests that the screenwriter hands the script to the
director and the director simply adds the performers and pictures. Truffaut
provocatively said: "(t)here are no good and bad movies, only good and bad
directors". Truffaut's article, by his own
admission, dealt primarily with scenarists or screenwriters, precisely
the screenwriting duo Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who, Truffaut believed,
simplified and compromised many of the great works of French literature in
order to support the political agenda of their day. In Truffaut's article, he
references the director Claude Autant-Lara's characterization of his
adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh as an "anti-war" book,
citing the problem that the book pre-dated the Second World War. Truffaut
applied the term "auteur" to directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls, Jacques
Becker, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson, who, aside from exerting their
distinct style, wrote the screenplays or worked on the writing of screenplays of
their films. In its embryonic form, the auteur theory
dealt with the nature of literary adaptations and Truffaut's discomfort
with the screenwriters Aurenche's and Bost's maxim that any film adaptation of
a novel should capture the spirit of the novel and deal only with its "filmable"
aspects. Truffaut believed that film directors like Robert Bresson were able
to use the film narrative to approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes.
To support this assertion, he used the film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary
of a Country Priest. Much of the writing of Truffaut and his
colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers du cinéma was designed
to lambaste not only the post-war French cinema but especially the big production
films of the cinéma de qualité. Although it has become widely believed that
Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile,
old-fashioned cinéma de papa, in fact Truffaut never used the term "cinéma de
papa". During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did not allow the
exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. In
1946, when French film critics were finally able to see the 1940s U.S.
movies, they were enamoured with these films.
Truffaut's theory maintains that a good director exerts such a distinctive style
or promotes such a consistent theme that his or her influence is unmistakable in
the body of his or her work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of directors
whose work showed a marked visual style as well as those whose visual style was
less pronounced but whose movies reflected a consistent theme. Truffaut
et al. made the distinction between auteurs and 'metteurs en scene', the
latter not being described as inferior directors making inherently poor films,
just lacking the authorial signature. Impact
The auteur theory was used by the directors of the nouvelle vague movement
of French cinema in the 1960s as justification for their intensely
personal and idiosyncratic films. One of the ironies of the auteur theory is
that, at the very moment Truffaut was writing, the break-up of the Hollywood
studio system during the 1950s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and
conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of
films Truffaut admired were actually being made.
The "auteur" approach was adopted in English-language film criticism in the
1960s. In the UK, Movie adopted auteurism, while in the U.S., Andrew
Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962".
This essay is where the term, "auteur theory", originated. To be classified as
an "auteur", according to Sarris, a director must accomplish technical
competence in his technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks
and feels, and interior meaning. Later in the decade, Sarris published The
American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which quickly
became the unofficial textbook of auteurism.
The auteurist critics - Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric
Rohmer, and others - wrote mostly about directors, although they also produced
some shrewd appreciations of actors. However, later Truffaut wrote: the
auteur theory "was started by Cahiers du Cinema and is forgotten in France, but
still discussed in American periodicals."
Today, auteur theory largely impacts the way films are categorized and spoken of
by film critics and audiences alike. For example, it is the trademark, visionary
aesthetics of Alfred Hitchcock's directing style that deem it appropriate
to refer to his films as "Hitchcock films", even though he didn't write the
screenplays for the films he directed . Criticism
Starting in the 1960s, some film critics began criticising auteur theory's focus
on the authorial role of the director. Pauline Kael and Sarris feuded in the
pages of The New Yorker and various film magazines. One reason for the backlash
is the collaborative aspect of shooting a film, and in the theory's privileging
of the role of the director. In Kael's 1971 essay on Citizen Kane, a classic
film for the auteur model, she points out how the film made extensive use of
the distinctive talents of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer
Gregg Toland. Notable screenwriters such as Ernest
Lehman, Nicholas Kazan, Robert Riskin, William Goldman and Guillermo Arriaga
have publicly balked at the idea that directors are more authorial than
screenwriters, while film historian Aljean Harmetz, referring to the
creative input of producers and studio executives in classical Hollywood,
argues that the auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio
system". The auteur theory was also challenged by
the influence of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism. The New Critics
argued that critics made an "intentional fallacy" when they tried to interpret
works of art by speculating about what the author meant, based on the author's
personality or life experiences. New Critics argued that information or
speculation about an author's intention was secondary to the words on the page
as the basis of the experience of reading literature.
In 2006, David Kipen coined the term Schreiber theory to refer to the theory
of the screenwriter as the principal author of a film.
See also List of motion picture-related topics
Philosophy of film Aesthetics
References External links
BBC guide Auteur Theory in Film Criticism
Teachers guide to auteur theory pdf 16+ source guides: Auteur Theory/Auteurs
at the British Film Institute