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.