Auteur theory
In film criticism, the 1950s-era Auteur theory holds that a director's films reflect that
director's personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary "Auteur" (the
French word for "author"). In some cases, film producers are considered to have a
similar "Auteur" role for films that they have produced.
In law the Auteur is the creator of a film as a work of art, and is the original copyright
holder. Under European Union law the film director shall always be considered the
author or one of the authors of a film.
Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated
by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. "Auteurism" is the method of
analyzing films based on this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director's
work that makes her or him an Auteur. Both the Auteur theory and the Auteurism
method of film analysis are frequently associated with the French New Wave and the
film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical Cahiers du
cinéma.
Origin
Auteur theory draws on the work of the "The Young Turks", a group of cinema
enthusiasts who wrote for the Cahiers du cinéma and argued that films should reflect
a director's personal vision. They championed filmmakers such as Howard Hawks,
Alfred Hitchcock 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
himself remained wary of its excesses, as he explained in his article "On the Auteur
Theory" (Cahier # 70, 1957).
Another key element of Auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the
caméra-stylo or "camera-pen" and the idea that directors should wield their cameras
like writers use their pens and that they need not be hindered by traditional
storytelling.
Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that moviemaking was an
industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for: the director should
use the commercial apparatus the way a writer uses a pen and, through the mise en
scène, imprint their vision on the work (conversely, the role of the screenwriter was
minimized in their eyes). While recognizing that not all directors reached this ideal,
they valued the work of those who neared it.
Truffaut's development
In his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("a certain trend in
French cinema"), François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des Auteurs", and
asserted that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting
than the best of Jean Delannoy's. "Politique" might very well be translated as "policy"
or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to look at films and to value them in a
certain way. Truffaut provocatively said that "(t)here are no good and bad movies,
only good and bad directors."
Truffaut's article dealt primarily by his own admission 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 topic of its day. In his article, he quotes the
director Claude Autant-Lara describing his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Devil
in the Flesh as an "anti-war" book when the book pre-dated the Second World War.
The term auteur described by Truffaut is applied to directors like Jean Renoir, Max
Ophuls, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson who aside from having a
distinct style also wrote the screenplays or worked on the screenplays of the film as
well. The auteur theory in its embryonic form 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 its spirit and deal only with
the "filmable" aspects of the books. Truffaut believed that film directors like Robert
Bresson using the film narrative at its disposal could approach even the so-called
"unfilmable" scenes, for which he used the film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary
of a Country Priest as an example.
Much of Truffaut's writing of this period, and of his colleagues at the film criticism
magazine Cahiers du cinéma, was designed to lambaste post-war French cinema,
and especially the big production films of the cinéma de qualité ("quality films").
Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile, old-fashioned cinéma
de papa (or "Dad's cinema"). During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did
not allow the exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane.
When French film critics were finally able to see these 1940s U.S. movies in 1946,
they were enamoured with these films.
Truffaut's theory maintains that all good directors (and many bad ones) have such a
distinctive style or consistent theme that their influence is unmistakable in the body
of their work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of both directors with a marked visual
style (such as Alfred Hitchcock), and those whose visual style was less pronounced
but who had nevertheless a consistent theme throughout their movies (such as Jean
Renoir's humanism).
Impact
The Auteur theory was used by the directors of the nouvelle vague (New Wave)
movement of French cinema in the 1960s (many of whom were also critics at the
Cahiers du cinéma) 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 halfFrench, half-English term, "Auteur theory", originated. To be classified as an
"Auteur", according to Sarris, a director must accomplish technical competence in
their technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior
meaning (although many of Sarris's auterist criteria were left vague). Later in the
decade, Sarris published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–
1968, which quickly became the unofficial bible of Auteurism.
The Auteurist critics—Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer—
wrote mostly about directors (as they were directors themselves), although they also
produced some shrewd appreciations of actors. Later writers of the same general
school have emphasised the contributions of star personalities like Mae West.
However, the stress was on directors; and screenwriters, producers and others have
reacted with a good deal of hostility. Writer William Goldman has said that, on first
hearing the Auteur theory, his reaction was, "What's the punchline?"
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 (one person cannot do everything) and in the
theory's privileging of the role of the director (whose name, at times, has become
more important than the movie itself). In Kael's review of 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, and
William Goldman have publicly balked at the idea that directors are more authorial
than screenwriters.
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 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.
References
Sight and Sound, Autumn, 190.
Los Angeles Times Magazine, "Lip Service," March 25, 2001.
Ian Scott, In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin
William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell?