Guelwaar

'Guelwaar' is a very accessible introduction to the often difficult delights of African cinema. Like Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray, Sembene has often been patronised as a non-Western director making films for Western audiences. And certainly, the film is full of elaborate, didactic speeches - about military, police and civic corruption; first world imperialism etc. - that play like lectures to the uninformed, and would presumably seem like statements of the obvious to indigenous viewers.

Unlike many African films, which are driven by myth, imagery, allegory, or the tropes of oral culture, 'Guelwaar' is reassuringly structured in a way familiar to Westerners. As in a film by Costa-Gavras, a detective story plot is used to uncover wider truths about the country's social and political framework.

There are three interrelated detective stories in the film: where is the missing corpse of the title hero (which translates as 'The Noble One'), a revered dissident fomenting opposition to local corruption and first world neo-imperialism?; how did Guelwaar die - if he was killed, who murdered him?; who was Guelwaar the man anyway?

As in Costa-Gavras, the film's initial focus on the local immediately implicates the national. The first detective story - about the corpse - reveals the deep religious hostilities in the country. Guelwaar was a Christian in a largely Muslim society; when it's discovered that his body was, due to an administrative blunder (a mordantly cynical piece of satire), buried in an Islamic graveyard, the dead Muslim's people refuse to 'desecrate' the cemetary, and return the body.

Most of the movie is taken up with the stand-off of the two peoples in which blind intransigence quickly gives way to a violence which is only neutered when the army are called in. it is unclear whether this is a justification for military visibility - the chief policeman is one of the few sane, non-corrupt characters in the film. Much is made of the irony that each clan proclaims the authenticity of a religion originating thousands of miles away.

The second detective story - who killed Guelwwar - again takes the narrative away from the local. it is clear that Guelwaar was a threat to local and international interests, both politically and religiously - at a ceremony celebrating the receipt of foreign aid, he delivers an incendiary speech denouncing his country's craven dependence on others. it is hard to disagree - none of the strong men in the area seem to do any work, the lands remain unharvested; civic dignitaries line their pockets, and their daughters become bread-winning prostitutes at a socially convenient distance. This is a pleasant, anti-Catch-22 state of affairs - the first world retain virtual power after colonialism; the locals get rich. Guelwaar is in serious danger of disrupting it. He has to be wiped out.

This is all very instructive in an educational kind of way, but would be rather dull as film drama in itself. There is a real thrill (and a kind of horror) when the foreign aid van is seized, its supplies sabotaged and trod on, but agit-prop as hagiography can be rather unpalatable. The third detective story complicates this. Who was Guelwaar? He was certainly an inspiring, charismatic, articulate leader. But he was also a bullying patriarch who diminished his wife and was quite content for his daughter to whore herself for his dinner.

Unlike most political films, which can be very macho, Sembene records female experience in such a society, in which rigid social and religious rules keep women at home while their men fornicate freely. Although the film ends with Guelwaar the heroic, the progression of the four flashbacks is more difficult. The first suggests his involvement in thuggish political violence. The second shows his contempt for his wife and family responsibilities. The third shows his taste for 'freedom' was more sexual than political. Only in the fourth do we get any idea of Guelwaar's nominal nobility, by which time our taste for rhetoric, as opposed to action, has worn thin. Surely the idea that two peoples, adhering to foreign religions, and fighting over a corpse, is irony enough.

So far, so Western. This narrative has other familiar trajectories - the uniting of a scattered family; the power and role of language, colonial and local; the transformation of a Western-educated son into a Senegalese patriot. The satire of bureaucracy and corruption can be very funny. The great pleasure of 'Guelwaar', however, are its digressions from the narrative, when it slows down to record a way of life, even in extremis; the mish mash of rites (tribal, Christian/Islamic); the colourful clothes and murals, the music.

Third Cinema

Third Cinema

Term first used by Solonas and Getino 1969  Argentinean film makers

Term presupposes existence of first and second

Opposes imperialist or colonialist cinema

Hollywood style First cinema

Independent/Auteur Second cinema

Indicative factors of third cinema

an ideologically combative film, differing from commodity products of dominant film industries and cinematic values of auterism

Counter cinema is understandable as mirror opposite of Hollywood therefore conventionally dictated by Hollywood

Wider social political and economic context.

African cinema has not developed like European or American cinema. Much of Africa was under colonial rule until 1960s . . .

Although much of Africa has gained a form of political independence it is not yet economically or culturally independent.

Cultural imperialism . . . media effects paradigm

European way of life example for rest of world seen as highest form of civilisation

euro centric

Historical Context

Sauvy 1952 talked of third world - cold war split the world in two non aligned nations

Third connotes new perspective. new experiences being articulated

1955 conference of independent countries third world becoming a political force immergence of political theory - euro value could be rejected - it has produced Hitler.

Colonialism had taken away history culture identity. Third cinema attempts to reclaim it

Algerian culture projected as being inferior. Women seen as exotic - who constructs those images.  link this to Said

Third cinema challenged this objectification - colonial stereotypes

crowd extras remember events

conveys authenticity

not actors in my film

Includes news footage real location gritty realism.

Sembene I consider cinema as a means of political action.

Characteristics

lack of attendance  geographical problems

Resources limited

Financial support  french speaking films in W Africa

About struggle

Show Battle of Algiers

Viewpoint of colonised not coloniser

Battle of Algiers early example

made 64 released 65 independent 62

one of first examples of third cinema

Italian/Algerian production

Saadi Yacof producer actor leader of FLN

Non linear narrative often no hero

Local dialect

Mainstream distributors refuse to take on third world films, regarding them as a minority interest

Third tries to reinvent cinema so that indigenous cultures can produce their own cinema

each locale should have its own cinema

rewriting basic rules of grammar

Re-introduce film language, anyone can make meaning. Physical form of the sign etc.

Encoding – decoding.

What did we call the decoding of the black students watching Dominant code

Preferred/Dominant/Hegemonic

Which reads the preferred meaning that has been encoded - it is read ‘full and straight’

Negotiated Code

Acknowledges the legitimacy of the dominant definitions while at a more restricted, situational level

Operates with exceptions to the rule

General acceptance of dominant definitions and a rejection of their local implication co exist

Worker pay restraints yes to the logic no to him or her receiving less money

Oppositional Position

Where texts are decoded in a contrary way.

Abberant Reading

Meaning of third cinema can be inaccesable because of belief systems, ideologies and cultural references. Also film styles.

We can call this a cultural curtain.

Audience tend to read film by incorporating into their schemata.

We in other words domesticate that which is foreign.

This has the tendency to subvert other cultures and therefore alter the representation of Africa.

The original culture is lost.

Dichotomy of theory between Gabriel theories

Gabriel Ethiopian scholar

Developed framework - for study of oppositional film practices that articulate cultural struggles  -  in this case Third cinema cuts across boundaries of national cinemas.

Third worldism imposes a fictive unity homogeneityniety that ignores the diversity of conditions of production and reception of third world film texts.

We could make a link here to the constraints of genre.

Gabriel describes those essential qualities third world films possess rather than those they seem to lack

view attacked as essentialist

A varietey of emerging trends stops third cinema functioning as a rigid classification term  -  so avoids setting up another hegemonic norm for 'correct' film making

There is no correct way of making a third cinema movie

Third Cinema is common enemy of imperialism but third world countries are undergoing extremely diversified degrees of development.

What is the role of 'non-native' critic in terms of encouraging a wider interest in third world cinema texts in the first world

quasi-imperial division of labour - third world produces first world produces criticism

Dualism

The valorisation of landscape in the long shot verses the psychologism of the close up.

Folklore logic disrupts Western dichotomies subject/object good/evil

Third world (both in territory and map) so often functions as a symbol of chaos that will mirror 1st worlds image of itself as order.

Mass communications replace conventional weapons. For neocolonialism mass communication is as effective as napalm

Cultural curtain prevails which prevent understanding from outside cultural perspective.

Tendency of audiences to read a film incorporating it within methodologies and critical matrices already familiar to it. - we domesticate what is alien to us.

This process may enrich our aesthetics and cultural traditions but it subverts other cultural traditions.

Lack of cultural perspective and intercultural understanding

Context - Text

Cultural Curtain

Reading a film from a geographic and cultural differencemay be problematised by several factors

The most serious example is the tendency of an audience to read a film by auto matically incorporating it within the methodologies and critical matricies which are already familiar to the audience.

The most important thing to remember when watching or studying third cinema is to insure against assuming that the features of a third world film always correspond to something familiar in First cinema.

There is a deeper level of meaning which can not be known by the uninitiated

EG's

Lavishly filling glass with whiskey a common shot in West, depicts affluence or may be the power of the alcohol

A thousand and one Hands  -  Baraka 1972

depicts the same image yet in Morroco (Islam) this image represents sacrilegious and godless.

Ethiopian film Gouma 1973

Question of honour or repentance of wrong doer rather than vengeance upon wrong doer

Blind person in West considered unfortunate

In Africa (Sembene) blind is a seer with foresight and foreknowledge.

A radical difference to the regular representations of the disabled.

Pervasive icons have radically different meanings

blonde beauty -

Blonde beauty in Morocco may stand for the destructiveness of European culture.

White as a symbol of innocence - Ethiopian symbol of death

Ethnocentric readings can alter the meanings of the narrative. consider major implications of animal slaughter in west compared to every day image of Africa

Americans are judged in terms of individual achievement

African responsibility for community

Underlying ideology of capatilism engenders the notion of individualism. (what Frankfurt school would call pseudo individuality).

Also the notion of competition.

There are often charateristic shots of men or women walking across the landscape

Traditional cosmology of individual dwarfed by background

emphasis on space rather than time.

Consider the collective purpose of the long shot.

Production and Technological determinants of Culture

Imported US leads audiences to expect certain level of technical brilliance

Third cinema must swap urban market for rural audience to negate this trend - however they are difficult to reach.

Production Content reception

Representations of Disability

Representations of Disability

Disability is an umbrella term – the needs and challenges faced by disabled peoples are many and varied. You need to say in your exam that representations are narrow.

Disabled people are often maginalised in mainstream media. This means that in certain groups are seen on the fringes of society and subsequently their media representations are both narrow and infrequent.

Goffman

 When the disabled person assumes that his/her audience knows the difference between what ought to be and what is E.G:  A woman missing an arm. The main challenge to the performance – is managing tension created because the audience is aware of the gap between ideal and actual.

Stigmatised People have to change their reactions to put the non-stigmatised at ease. They use a variety of coping strategies.

·        rejection of stigmatised label by over-achievement in an area considered difficult (para-olympics)

·        joining self-help groups to counter-prejudice and social oppression

·        development o a self-deprecating humour which draws attention to the stigma and relieves the tension for the non-stigmatised.

In some African cinema disability is represented in a positive manner. For example a blind person may be deemed to have special intuition and an ability to see into the future. In UK TV representation of disability can often signify pity.

  

Dominant notions of disability: the individual model 
The societal view of disability generally conforms to the individual or overcoming or medical model of disability. This holds that disability is inherent in the individual, whose responsibility it is to ‘overcome’ her or his ‘tragic’ disability. 
Often this ‘overcoming’ is achieved through medical intervention, such as attempts at ‘cures’. For example, top wheelchair athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson was forced as a child to wear heavy leg callipers which gave her blisters, rather than being offered the simple and practical option of using a wheelchair. This approach to disability aims for the normalisation of disabled people, often through the medicalisation of their condition.

 Disability as metaphor 
Jenny Morris (1991) argues that cultural portrayals of disability are usually about the feelings of non-disabled people and their reactions to disability, rather than about disability itself. Disability thus becomes:

...a metaphor...for the message that the non-disabled writer wishes to get across, in the same way that ‘beauty’ is used. In doing this, the writer draws on the prejudice, ignorance and fear that generally exist towards disabled people, knowing that to portray a character with a humped back, with a missing leg, with facial scars, will evoke certain feelings in the reader or audience. The more disability is used as a metaphor for evil, or just to induce a sense of unease, the more the cultural stereotype is confirmed (Morris, 1991:93).

Watch the clip(s) and answer the following questions

What type of disability is being represented?

Has the encoder used an able-bodied actor to play a disabled character?

Why is there a limited range of disabled representations on Television?

How does the encoder use the tensions Goffman describes for comic effect?

Is the representation designed to signify pity/humour/evil/disgust/voyeuristic pleasure? How do you know this?

What affects our willingness to offer pity when confronting representations of disability? Consider whether the character being represented is deserving of pity?

Useful images to consider

Hannibal (film) 
Agent Starling goes to see Lecter’s victim who is in bed, hidden in the shadows and surrounded by curtains. The light is raised to give a horror view of his face. The character here is evil too, so we associate his facial scarring with punishment for his evil nature, and also with the visual manifestation of evil (we expect evil people to look evil, thanks to generations of fairy tales). We are supposed to be shocked, to recoil in horror. 
How do you think this affects people with facial scarring?

Newspaper photographs 
The tabloids are a particularly good source. One recent example was in The Daily Mail, where a Muslim cleric who had his hands blown off in Afghanistan was pictured with his hooks on prominent display, which were described in the article as ‘metal claws’. The article aimed to expose the supposed glut of ‘bogus asylum seekers’ who are also ‘terrorists’ and who are claiming social security benefits funded by taxpayers in Britain. It thus combined iconic images of Muslim fundamentalist masculinity with disability in order to create and to maximise the fear of ‘foreignness’ associated with post 9/11 society.

Television documentaries 
Recent examples include Amputee Admirers (Five) which purports to discuss Internet-based groups who run dating/social groups for amputees and those who are attracted to them. In this case, an academic who is also an amputee is questioned in order to give an element of political correctness to a programme which is essentially about voyeurism. However, the camerawork exposes the subtext by zooming in on the academic’s stumps and scars as she speaks. Another example of this is in ITV’s The Unluckiest Faces in Britain which utilises stark lighting and mise-en-scene and big close-ups to emphasise the facial differences of its subjects, while they are interviewed in a supposedly sympathetic manner.

Television drama and film 
Wheelchairs tend to predominate here, since they are an iconic sign of disability. Most actors playing disabled characters are, however, not disabled. The wheelchair allows the character to be obviously disabled, whilst still looking ‘normal’, and does not therefore present any major challenges for audience identification. A good example of a film that challenges this view is Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978).

Disability and gender: ‘Supercrips’ 
Supercrips are people who conform to the individual model by overcoming disability, and becoming more ‘normal’, in a heroic way. Jenny Morris argues that in film and TV drama, disability is often used as a narrative device to express ideas of dependency, lack of autonomy, tragedy etc. She argues that

...women do not have to be portrayed as disabled in order to present an image of vulnerability and dependency... therefore most disabled characters in film and television in recent years have been men (Morris in Pointon, 1997:26).

Thus many Supercrip films are about the hell of dependency for men. Since women are viewed as dependent, there is little point in making films about their ‘struggles’ with disability. Perhaps disability does not ‘matter’ so much to a woman? 
An example of a ‘Supercrip’ is the Irish writer Christy Brown, who described his book My Left Foot as his “plucky little cripple story”. The film of the same name is full of useful sequences. 
Problems with the Supercrip stereotype: 
• It focuses on a single individual’s ability to overcome, then puts the onus on other disabled people to do the same. 
• What about those who can’t or won’t try to live up to this stereotype? 
It is notable that the actors playing these Supercrip roles - which often earn them Oscars - are invariably non-disabled superstars with the requisite face and physique. Thus an impaired male body is visually represented as a perfect physical specimen in a wheelchair.

Difference 
It has been argued that dominant notions of ‘normality’ and beauty do not allow for the natural range of difference in human form. These notions are not only prejudicial to the acceptance of disabled people, but also increasingly impact on non-disabled people. Charlotte Cooper, for example, applies the social model to obesity, and concludes that there are some important categories through which obesity can be defined as a disability: 
• A slender body is ‘normal’ 
• Fatness is a deviation from the norm. 
• Fat and disabled people share low social status. 
• Fatness is medicalised (e.g. jaw-wiring and stomach-stapling). 
• Fat people are blamed for their greed and lack of control over their bodies. 
Consider why it is that fat people or disabled people are rarely portrayed as sexually attractive.

Discussing telethons 
Telethons - especially the BBC’s Children in Need - provide a range of interesting images of disability. 
Telethons have been roundly criticised for being “the twentieth-century version of the beggar in the streets. Even the begging-bowls are no longer in our own hands...” 
• Is this true? 
• Are telethons ever OK? 
• What would you replace them with?

Points about Telethons: 
• Telethons use images of brave, smiling and grateful recipients of charity. They ask us to donate out of relief that we don’t have their problems. 
• They rely on ‘cute’ children, which gives a false impression of the real incidence of disability in the population. 
• They create the impression that it is not the job of the state to provide essential funds for disadvantaged groups, and do not question why people are disadvantaged. By making certain people dependent on charity, we create beggars. (Charity is now big business, with marketing executives receiving six figure salaries...) 
• Anne Karpf argues that there is a need for charities, but that telethons act to keep the audience in the position of givers, and to keep recipients in their place as grateful and dependent. 
• Emotive images push other images out. Those who look fit and well are assumed to be able to look after themselves, which is not always the case. 
• Charity is not just about money – it’s also about helping someone with their problems and working alongside them. 
• Telethons could help us to understand, but usually don’t. People donate because they’re being entertained. There is a conflict between the way you raise money, and the way you raise awareness. They are not necessarily the same thing. 
• Who will give disabled people a job when they see such images? The implicit meaning is that we should help disabled people, not that we should integrate them into society.

What would disabled people like to see? 
Karen Ross undertook a qualitative survey of disabled viewers and listeners and concluded:


Many of the changes that viewers and listeners would like to see take place in broadcasting can be described as ‘respect’ issues: respecting the diversity of disability and portraying those varied experiences; respecting the views of disabled people and consulting with them to provide more authentic and credible portraits; respecting the abilities of disabled people and actively involving disabled media professionals in all aspects of programme production across all genres...Crucially, what disabled audiences want is an acknowledgement of the fact that disability is a part of daily life and for the media to reflect that reality, removing the insulting label of ‘disabled’ and making it ordinary (Ross, 1997: 676).

Pulp Fiction Macro Analysis

Macro Analysis Pulp Fiction

Approaches

Genre              Narrative         Contextual      Spectatorship              Auteur

Genre  Two types of analysis

Descriptive

        The distinctive textual properties of a genre typically listed by film and television theorists include:

       

narrative - similar (sometimes formulaic) plots and structures, predictable situations, sequences, episodes, obstacles, conflicts and resolutions;

characterization - similar types of characters (sometimes stereotypes), roles, personal qualities, motivations, goals, behaviour;

basic themes, topics, subject matter (social, cultural, psychological, professional, political, sexual, moral), values and what Stanley Solomon refers to as recurrent 'patterns of meaning'

setting - geographical and historical;

iconography (echoing the narrative, characterization, themes and setting) - a familiar stock of images or motifs, the connotations of which have become fixed; primarily but not necessarily visual, including décor, costume and objects, certain 'typecast' performers (some of whom may have become 'icons'), familiar patterns of dialogue, characteristic music and sounds, and appropriate physical topography;

filmic techniques - stylistic or formal conventions of camerawork, lighting, sound-recording, use of colour, editing etc. (viewers are often less conscious of such conventions than of those relating to content).

Functional Genre analysis

Placing Gangster films in Context

Prohibition 1920-1933  -  outlawing of alcohol offered opportunities for Criminals

The Depression 1929 – the American Dream appeared broken. Many who had worked hard ended up with nothing. People still wanted the dream but there was no legal means for them to achieve it.

Gangsters became heroes – fulfilled American dream but not by conventional route.

Crime Pays

Early Gangster films were given a realist feel. Drawing upon events that were actually happening and sometimes interweaving stock footage as well as having journalists working on scripts

Semi-documentary style of film-making including stock footage

Golden era of Gangster films 1930-34 

Little Caesar 1930

The Public Enemy 1931

Scarface 1932

Function of Films was to reinforce the view that Crime doesn’t pay. Functional genre analysis allows the student to place the film in context and ask yourself what did the film ‘do’ to society. It was understood that these films had to have a rise and fall narrative structure. The ending of the film had to make it clear that Crime doesn’t pay.

Narrative

Linear         Todorov

Rise and Fall – functional analysis- see above

Propp's Character theory

Vladimir Propp (1969) developed a character theory for studying media texts and productions, which indicates that there were 7 broad character types in the 100 tales he analysed, which could be applied to other media:

        The villain (struggles against the hero)

        The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object)

        The (magical) helper (helps the hero in the quest)

        The princess (person the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative)

        Her father

        The dispatcher (character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off)

The hero or victim/seeker hero, reacts to the donor, weds the princess

Narrative in Pulp Fiction

Coffee Shop Hold-up

Retrieving the case part 1

Jack Rabbit Slims

Your father’s watch

Zed’s pawnshop

Retrieving the case part 2 the bonnie situation

The coffee shop hold up

Place in chronological order then draw a line from one scene to the next. You will see the film has a spiral like narrative structure. It begins in the middle, moves to first the end then the beginning then works its way back to the middle – one could say the film was anti narrative.

Auteur theory – see separate post

Intertextuality – Pulp Fiction makes lots of popular cultural references to many other films amongst other things.

Decontextualised scenes

Some scenes appear simply because of the directors desire to construct a particular scene. Consider the dancing in Jack Rabbit Slims or the rape scene in Zed’s Pawnshop. How important to the narrative are these films?

Spectatorship

Active male/passive female

Auteur Theory - detailed

The aim of the auteur policy is to assign to certain directors the title of artists, rather than thinking of them as mere technicians. Auteur critics study the style and themes (or subject matter) of a director’s films and assign to them the title of art if they show a consistency of style and theme.

Directors whose films show a consistency of style and theme are called auteurs. By contrast, directors who show no consistency of style and theme in their work are called metteurs-en-scene, and are relegated to the status of mere technicians rather than artists.

According to auteur critics, the difference between an auteur and a metteur-en-scene is that, whereas an auteur can transform a mediocre script into a great film, a metteur-en­-scene can only make a mediocre film out of a mediocre script.

Auteur critics made the evaluative distinction between an auteur and a metteur­-en-scene because an auteur is able to maintain a consistency of style and theme by working against the constraints of the Hollywood mode of production.

In other words, an auteur is able to transcend the restrictions imposed upon him or her by the Hollywood studio system.

But more central than the distinction between an auteur and a metteur-en-­scene is the question:

Is it legitimate to concentrate on the director as the primary creator of a film?

Auteur critics acknowledge that the cinema is, of course, a collective activity involving many people at various stages of pre-production, production and post-production.

Nevertheless, the auteur critics argue, it is the director who makes the choices concerning framing, camera position, the duration of the shot, and so on - those aspects of mise-en-shot that determine the way everything is visualised on screen.

And it is precisely mise-en-shot that auteur critics focus on, because this is what makes film unique, what distinguishes film from other arts.

First we will look at the origin of the auteur policy, which initially concentrated exclusively on the stylistic consistencies of a director's work.

Other auteur critics expanded the scope of the auteur policy by looking at an equally important consistency - the thematic consistency in a director's work, the uniformity and coherence of subject matter across a director's films.

The auteurist's emphasis on the consistency of style and theme is expressed in the statement that auteurs are always attempting to make the same film.

Francois Truffaut and Cahiers du Cinema

The auteur policy emerges from the film criticism of the French journal Cahiers du Cinema 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, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohner and Claude Chabrol.

The manifesto of the Cahiers du Cinema 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 criticises 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

These values were achieved by the following means:

·  high production values

·  reliance on stars

·  genre conventions

·  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 emphasises, the success or failure of these films depends entirely

on the quality of their scripts. Truffaut's attack is focused primarily on two script writers

Film  is seen to be completed when the script has been written.

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 Cinema critics and the New 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 Cinema respected the work of Hollywood filmmakers, such as Alfred 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.

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 personalised film making, rather than the mechanical transposition of a script on to 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-scene  or, more accurately. mise-en-shot

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 misc-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 rejects 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 own aesthetic vision on the material. This is one reason Truffaut chose to film Henri Pierre Roche's novel Jules and Jim in 1961.

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 film critics Ian Cameron Mark Shivas, Paul Mayersberg and Victor Perkins in the in magazine Movie, first published in May 1962.

The Cahiers critics were notoriously well known for preferring the worst films of an auteur to the best films of a mettuer-en-scene.

In contrast to the judgements of Cahiers du Cinema, Movie critics were more moderate. They recognised that even auteurs can make bad films and that the metteur-en-scene 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 (1943).

For such an evaluative mode of criticism as the auteur policy, it is inevitable that the critics of Cahiers du Cinema and Movie would differ about the directors they identified as auteurs.

Andrew Sarris

During the early 1960s, Andrew Sarris introduced the auteur policy into North American film criticism via his essav Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962' in the journal Film Culture (No.27, Winter 1962-63). 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.

Finally, an auteurist history of the cinema needed to he 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 and theme across a director's films.

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.