françoIStruffautanD cAhiERS Du ciNéMA
The auteur policy emerged from the film criticism of the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s. This policy was put into practice by a number of critics who became well-known film-makers of the French New Wave of the 1960s, including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. The manifesto of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics is Truffaut’s 1954 essay ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, whereas the manifesto of the New Wave film-makers is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film A Bout de Souffle ( Breathless). I shall look at each in turn.
In ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, Truffaut criticizes the dominant tendency in French cinema during the 1940s
and 1950s, which he calls the tradition of quality. This cinema is a contrived and wooden cinema that projects a bourgeois image of good taste and high culture. In Ginette Vincendeau’s definition, the tradition of quality:
… refers to a loose industry category, actively promoted (by financial aid and prizes) to project a ‘quality’ image of French film: expertly crafted pictures with high production values and often derived from literary sources. Psychological and/
or costume dramas such as Jean Delannoy’s la Symphonie Pastorale (1946), Claude Autant-Lara’s douce (1943), Rene Clement’s Jeux interdits/Forbidden Games (1952), Max Ophuls’
80
la Ronde (1950), Jacques Audry’s minne, l’ingénue libertine/
minne (1950), Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1955), Rene Clair’s les Grandes manoeuvres (1955), all projected an image of Frenchness tied to good taste and high culture.
Encyclopedia of European Cinema, pp. 426–7
These values were achieved by the following means:
3
3
high production values
3
3
reliance on stars
3
3
genre conventions
3
3
privileging the script.
For Truffaut, the tradition of quality offers little more than the practice of filming scripts, of mechanically transferring scripts to the screen. As Truffaut emphasizes, the success or failure of these films depends entirely on the quality of their scripts.
Truffaut’s attack is focused primarily on two scriptwriters, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost.
Truffaut writes:
Aurenche and Bost are essentially literary men and
I reproach them here for being contemptuous of the cinema by under-estimating it.
‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’, p. 229
These literary men write scriptwriters’ films, in which the film is seen to be completed when the script has been written.
Incidentally, the French director Bertrand Tavernier returned to the tradition of quality film-making in the 1970s. He opposes himself to the New Wave, which was clearly signified when he asked Aurenche and Bost to script his first film The Watchmaker of Saint Paul (1974).
The privileging of the script in the tradition of quality deflected attention away from both the film-making process and the director. The Cahiers du Cinéma critics and the New 3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 81
Wave film-makers defined themselves against literature, against the literary script, and against the tradition of quality, and instead promoted ‘the cinema’ as such. Whereas the tradition of quality advocated a conservative style of film-making, in which the best technique is one that is not seen, the style of the French New Wave films is similar to the decorative arts, where style draws attention to itself. In the tradition of quality, film style is a means to an end, a means of conveying story content to the spectator. But in the New Wave films, style becomes independent of the story. New Wave films dazzle the spectator with style rather than story content. The auteur policy therefore embodies Marshall McLuhan’s idea that ‘the medium is the message’.
The critics of Cahiers du Cinéma respected the work of Hollywood film-makers, such as Hitchcock, Howard Hawks,
Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Douglas Sirk, Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray, all of whom worked against the scripts imposed upon them by the studios. In the following extract, Jacques Rivette attempts to explain why Lang is an auteur, while Vincente Minnelli is only a metteur-en-scène: When you talk about Minnelli the first thing you do is talk about the screenplay, because he always subordinates his talent to something else. Whereas when you talk about Fritz Lang, the first thing is to talk about Fritz Lang, then about the screenplay.
Quoted in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1960s, p. 3
An auteur in the Hollywood studio system is a director who transcends the script by imposing on it his or her own style and vision. An auteur film involves subjective and personalized film-making, rather than the mechanical transposition of a script onto film. The script is the mere pretext for the activity of film-making, and an auteur film is about the film-making practices involved in filming a script, rather than being about the script itself. But how does a Hollywood director impose his own vision on a studio film? Primarily through his manipulation of mise-en-scène, or, more accurately, 82
mise-en-shot (as I pointed out in Chapter 1 and at the beginning of this chapter, most critics do not distinguish mise-en-scène from mise-en-shot). In the following quotation, we see John Caughie linking the auteur policy to what he calls mise-en-scène (although it is evident from the quotation that he means mise-en-shot):
It is with the mise-en-scène that the auteur transforms the material which has been given to him; so it is in the mise-en-scène – in the disposition of the scene, in the camera movement, in the camera placement, in the movement from shot to shot – that the auteur writes his individuality into the film.
Theories of Authorship, pp. 12–13
Victor Perkins (a member of the Movie group – see the next section) has also outlined the director’s role in detail ( Film as Film, Chapter 5). He writes that:
The director’s most significant area of control is over what happens within the image. His control over the action, in detail, organization and emphasis, enables him to produce a personal treatment of the script situation. On occasion the treatment can be so personal as to constitute a reversal of attitudes contained in the script.
Film as Film, p. 74
Perkins adds that the director does not need to subvert the script to make a personal statement; instead, he or she can intensify part of the script’s possibilities to create meaning: The director has to start from what is known or necessary or likely or, at the very least, possible. From this base he can go on to organize the relationship between action, image and décor, to create meaning through pattern.
Film as Film, p. 94
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 83
The creation of ‘meaning through pattern’ is another way of saying ‘significant form’ (a term discussed in this book’s Introduction).
Finally, Perkins also emphasizes that it is the director’s control of the action and the actors’ gestures that partly defines personal style: ‘the director defines his effects within the action’
( Film as Film, p. 95), which can be effective and distinctive as long as the director does not impose meaning on or reach beyond the limits of the action.
Spotlight
Mise-en-shot names those techniques through which everything is expressed on screen. An auteur works out his or her own vision by establishing a consistent style of mise-en-shot, a style that usually works in opposition to the demands of the script.
For the French New Wave film-makers, the script merely served as the pretext to the activity of filming. Indeed, for auteur critics, there was no point in talking about the film script at all, for an auteur film is one that does not represent a pre-existing story, but is one that represents the often spontaneous events that took place in front of the camera.
The French New Wave can be seen as a film-making practice that r
ejects classical Hollywood cinema’s dominance by
producers (in which the producer acts as the central manager controlling the work of the technicians) in favour of a more
‘archaic’ mode of production that favours the director.
Consequently, the New Wave directors strongly supported
the idea of filming unimportant stories, which then allows the director great freedom to impose his or her own aesthetic vision on the material. This is one reason Truffaut chose to film Henri Pierre Roche’s novel Jules and Jim in 1961.
3
3 Movie magazine
Before moving on to the New Wave film-makers I shall mention, in passing, how the auteur policy was taken up in Britain and North America. The auteur policy was adopted by the British 84
film critics Ian Cameron, Mark Shivas, Paul Mayersberg and Victor Perkins in the magazine Movie, first published in May 1962. Like the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, the Movie critics sought auteur s within the Hollywood studio system. Similarly, Movie critics also defined the auteur in terms of self-expression, as manifest in the stylistic and thematic consistency across a director’s work. However, Movie was more flexible than Cahiers du Cinéma. The Cahiers critics were notoriously well known for preferring the worst films of an auteur to the best films of a metteur-en-scène. For example, Cahiers critics regarded Nicholas Ray to be the ultimate auteur. For this reason, in 1961
they hailed Party Girl to be a masterpiece, Ray’s best film to date (above his other films such as They Live by Night, 1948
and Rebel Without a Cause, 1955). However, Party Girl (1958) is generally considered a routine and hack piece of work – even Ray himself called it ‘a bread-and-butter job’.
In contrast to the judgements of Cahiers du Cinéma, Movie critics were more moderate. They recognized that even
auteurs can make bad films and that the metteur-en-scène can, occasionally at least, make a good film. The prime example of the latter is Michael Curtiz, who is regarded by auteur critics to have directed only one film of lasting value in the history of the cinema – Casablanca (1942).
For such an avowedly evaluative mode of criticism as the auteur policy, it is inevitable that the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma and Movie would differ about the directors they identified as auteur s. For example, whereas Cahiers classified Minnelli as a metteur-en-scène (as we saw above in the quotation from Rivette), Movie defined him as an undisputed auteur and discussed him in three issues of Movie, including the first issue which consisted of an interview with Minnelli together with an article called ‘Minnelli’s Method’ by Shivas. In this article, Shivas argues that the consistency of Minnelli’s film style is sufficient to define him as an auteur, since Minnelli’s style transcends the film script – a defining characteristic of an auteur. Shivas argues for the superiority of style over script in relation to two of Minnelli’s films, The Reluctant Debutante and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 85
Minnelli’s way with William Douglas Home’s rather dreary play
[the Reluctant debutante] is to emphasize the falseness and untrammeled idiocy of the Season by insisting that the adults behave like children and the children like adults, reinforcing the less than witty lines primarily in its visual treatment… As a result of Minnelli’s visual style, a mediocre story becomes as sophisticated as the Philadelphia Story is verbally witty.
With the Four Horsemen , Minnelli was once more landed with a turkey, an old one, too, of which only a primitive like King Vidor (duel in the Sun) could have made a meal… the Four Horsemen is not, except from the point of view of decoration, roses all the way, but at its best it transcends its story by the brilliance of its mise-en-scène .
‘Minnelli’s Method’, Movie, 1, 1962, p. 18
For Shivas, Minnelli is an auteur because his films go beyond the mediocre scripts handed to him by the studio. A metteur-en-scène, by contrast, would have simply made two mediocre films from these mediocre scripts.
anDreWSarrIS
During the early 1960s, Andrew Sarris introduced the auteur policy into North American film criticism via his essay ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’ in the journal Film Culture (No. 27, Winter, 1962–3). Sarris translated the term ‘la politique des auteurs’ into the term ‘ auteur theory’, giving it the prestige that goes with the word ‘theory’. Furthermore, he argued that the auteur theory is primarily a history of American cinema, since it develops a historical awareness of what individual directors have achieved in the past. This is in contrast to Hollywood practice where, according to studio executives, a director is only as good as the last film he or she made. An auteurist history of the cinema needed to be evaluative, according to Sarris, if it was not to become a hobby like stamp collecting or trainspotting.
The criteria for evaluation were the same for Sarris as for other auteur critics – consistency in style (how) and theme (what) across a director’s films: ‘The whole point of meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement’
( The American Cinema, p. 36).
86
Sarris published an evaluative history of American auteurs in 1968 in the form of his comprehensive book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which became the bible of auteur critics. To write The American Cinema, Sarris saw over 6,000 films of 200 directors. Without VHS, DVD or many TV channels, that was a hard task. Only after viewing all the films of a particular director can the auteur critic evaluate a director as good or bad, strong or weak. In other words, for Sarris, the distinction between strong and weak directors should not be taken on trust. It must be proved through a systematic viewing and analysis of a director’s films. Despite this emphasis on watching a large quantity of films, the auteur critic is still concerned with the particular details of each film, its uniqueness.
Andrew Sarris on one of Nicholas Ray’s themes: ‘Ray does have a theme, and a very important one, namely that every relationship establishes its own moral code, and that there is no such thing as abstract morality. This much was made clear in Rebel Without a Cause when James Dean and his fellow adolescents leaned back in their seats in the planetarium and passively accepted the proposition the universe itself was drifting without any frame of reference. ( The American Cinema, pp. 107–8.)
A BouT DE SoufflE/BREAThlESS
So far we have surveyed the work of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics and New Wave film-makers in an attempt to explain the motivations for their privileging of the director as auteur.
We then saw how the idea of the director as auteur entered British and North American film criticism. We shall now turn to Godard’s film A Bout de Souffle/Breathless to look at the aesthetics of the French New Wave at work.
The French New Wave is one of the major movements of
European Art Cinema. Vincendeau ( Encyclopedia of European Cinema, p. xiv) defines European Art Cinema as sharing the following aesthetic features:
3
3
a slower editing and narrative pace than Hollywood cinema 3
3
a strong ‘authorial voice’
3
3
an investment in realism and ambiguity
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 87
3
3
the desire to provoke thought and sometimes shock
3
3
a taste for unhappy endings.
In A Bout de Souffle (1960), we see Godard creating most of these aesthetic features by using the following production techniques, all of which were innovative when Godard made the film:
3
3
location shooting (rather than the studio, as in the tradition of quality)
3
3
a hand-held camera (made possible by the invention of
lightweight cameras)
3
3
natural light
ing (rather than artificial studio lighting) 3
3
casual acting
3
3
subversion of the rules of classical editing.
All these techniques, none of which is to be found in the tradition of quality, turn the films into spontaneous and improvised performances, rather than being the mere representation of the script, which exists before the film-making process begins.
A Bout de Souffle begins with Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) stealing a car to drive to Paris. However, two policemen on motorcycles chase him. He turns off the road, but is followed by one of the policemen. Michel shoots the policeman and runs off. What makes this part of the film unusual and innovative is the way it is filmed.
I shall describe the shots, beginning with Michel being chased by the police, to the moment when Michel shoots one of the policemen. I shall then discuss the production techniques used in this sequence of shots:
1 The camera is inside Michel’s car. He overtakes a lorry and is spotted by two policemen.
2 The camera, outside the car, shows Michel overtaking the lorry. The car is shown travelling from screen right to screen left.
3 The camera, inside the car, quickly pans from the windscreen of the car to the back window, where the police can be seen chasing Michel.
88
4 Cut to a slightly different shot of the police chasing Michel.
The camera then pans to inside the car (that is, it reverses the pan of shot 3).
5 The camera, outside the car, shows it moving from screen left to screen right.
6 Shot of the policemen on their motorcycles. They are shown travelling from screen right to screen left.
7 Michel pulls off the road. He looks off-screen left, and sees…
8 one of the police motorcycles racing by.
9 Michel opens the bonnet of the car to try to get it started again. He looks off-screen left and sees…
10 the second police motorcycle racing by.
11 Cut back to Michel attempting to repair the jump lead that will start the car again. Michel looks up and sees…
Film Studies- An Introduction Page 11