- The origin of what is now called “Auteurism” can be traced to the politique des auteurs inaugurated by François Truffaut in an article titled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” published in 1954 in the Cahiers du Cinema.
- By the French politique I am tempted to understand this article as a kind of politics. However, it seems that the word better translates to the word “policy”. And the word auteurs can be understood as “authors,” however in the article at hand, the term is used by Truffaut mainly to refer to writers. By which formula we have the translation, “policy of writers”.
- Yet, as we all know, auteurism is about authorship, specifically the authorship of directors — the word has not generally been used to refer to any other work done in the process of filmmaking.
- So instead of insisting on understanding the politique as a “policy of writers,” shall I take the liberty of trying to trace Truffaut’s thought as having the germ, the seed for a “policy of authors”? At any rate, I will.
- What really seemed to getting on Truffaut’s nerves at the time was not that directors or writers were not being recognized, as is commonly thought; in fact, the large part of the article is a focused attack on a specific filmmaking trio, director-writer Claude Autant-Lara and the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost.
- I’ve only seen one film by this filmmaking trio, the 1947 Devil in the Flesh, adapted from the novel by Raymond Radiguet. It wasn’t so bad; I can’t say it never engaged me, although at the moment I can’t recall a thing about it. Whence this politicking?
- Here’s what Truffaut condemns them for: “A constant and deliberate care to be unfaithful to the spirit as well as the letter; a very marked taste for profanation and blasphemy. ” This is in reference to a proposed adaptation of Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, which takes some startling liberties with the text; an effective example indeed, knowing as we do now the remarkably enduring appeal of Bresson’s more scaled-down, nose-to-the-grindstone adaptation.
- Of these two statements, the first is a moral judgment, and the second a kind of personal attack, a sideways ad hominem. I used to find the first of the two more important for understanding Truffaut’s point, but more and more I wonder if the second is where the real current of what would become “auteurism” began.
- Not many of us these days would go to films ill at-ease, wondering if we’ll be subjected to “profanation and blasphemy”. It’s not on our radar as something to avoid from films. It is language from an older time, perhaps older than Truffaut’s time, which I think he adopts purposefully to provoke. It sounds right-wing now — and it sounded right-wing at the time, because the politique was directed at left-wing critics and moviegoers; I think that’s whose attention Truffaut was really trying to get. And it’s precisely this very of-its-time, almost quaint, expression, which still grabs my attention today.
- In my mind, the two propositions are two different kinds of criticisms.
- The first criticizes the filmmakers’ way of doing things. In the form of an ethical command, it might be rephrased “thou shalt not betray neither the letter nor the spirit of the original work”. Most of us would accept “thou shalt not betray the spirit of the original work,” as a fairly reasonable demand, as what we might ideally expect from filmmakers.
- The second criticizes the virtues of the filmmakers, via the qualities found in the work. When Truffaut is alarmed by and reacts against the “profanation and blasphemy” in the film, is he really asking that all filmmakers be on the lookout for such defects? Reading this proposition, my first reaction is not to nod along and say yes, but to wonder about the mind of the critic, to figure out his values. It reveals something to me, not just about the film, but about how this person, Truffaut, has personally reacted to it. It’s his perspective on it.
- What fascinates me about this is that, in fact, the change that the politique des auteurs effected was not a change in ethics necessarily (though the New Wave filmmakers did live out their ethic in different ways) but a change in perspective. And this change in perspective was wrought in the USA, expressed by Andrew Sarris in his 1962 “Notes on the Auteur Theory”.
- In this piece, Sarris makes two claims: that films have authors, and that those authors are the directors of the film. In my own mind, this means that cinema is an art of direction, because the authors of the cinema are directors.
- Isn’t this, however, a little different from what Truffaut originally was proposing in his politique? In fact, nowhere can I find evidence in “A Certain Tendency” that Truffaut makes this exact argument. His efforts are concentrated against the creative attitudes of the filmmakers he criticizes; he doesn’t make an argument either for or against the director-as-author idea. What he really tries to defend is the concept of the director who also writes the films, who authors the films. So what came to the USA as the Auteur Theory was really the underwritten principle behind the argument propounded in the politique, which had to be externalized as it was exported out to the USA. In the process, Sarris ditches the defense of the director-writer in favor of just the director, whose function he defines as giving visual expressiveness to films.
- I mostly accept Sarris’ conclusions, though as a piece of theory, I think “Notes on the Auteur Theory” makes some missteps. It’s true that there’s something intuitive about thinking of movies as being authored by whoever shapes the visual content of the movies, because that’s where our attention is generally drawn sensorily; but if there’s authorship in movies, I’d want to define that authorship around the quality of the medium that defines it. The author of a movie, if there is one, ought to be the one who governs the movie’s movie-ness; and what gives a movie its movie-ness, to my mind, is its dependence on the realism of photographic (and phonographic) records.
- Still, by that reasoning alone it seems that we would have a rocky road to the orthodox auteurist position that the director is to be considered as the author of the films. Sarris, I think, took a more direct route to this conclusion. He just took a leap, adopted the auteurist perspective originated in France, went to see the films directed by the relevant directors, and came to his position, his “auteur theory”. And all I needed to do to affirm this position was to watch the films directed by the directors included in his The American Cinema!
- What’s tricky here is that I came around to the auteurist position, not because I needed films to have an author, but because I wanted films to be good. And personally, I found the films in The American Cinema to be good, before I could trace their goodness to the directors of the films. So it doesn’t make sense to me to turn around and say that only auteur films are good films, since the power of the director’s position might be used for good or ill. This seems to me to be the more pervasive interpretation of the “Auteur Theory”. It makes more sense for me to say that when a film is good, there’s a good chance that the director was involved with the result in some way.
- Here’s the rub: though we all know that some films are good and other films are not, it’s hard to be confident of our discernment in these matters. We all have our tastes, each separately according to our personalities, and it’s hard to say what the point of this all is if it all comes down to subjective opinion whether or not Bresson made better films than Autant-Lara.
- Auteurism has established a taste for certain kinds of movies, and certain types of directors. Maybe not just one taste, but a family of tastes. These tastes have tended to oppose other tastes, enemy tastes which were thought to be in power. Auteurists lobbied for their films, for their people; they argued in their favor, they defended them from detractors, they praised their virtues and brushed over their defects. Now many of us think in terms of directors when it comes to cinema, but to me that wasn’t the point. What films we value, and who made them — that’s what was really at stake. The politique was initiated as an offensive in a war of values. If in peacetime those conflicts look a little exaggerated (are we at peace?) it doesn’t help us any to forget the things which were fought for.
Revisiting The Politique des Auteurs (With additional thoughts on Auteurism and Auteur Theory)
3 responses to “Revisiting The Politique des Auteurs (With additional thoughts on Auteurism and Auteur Theory)”
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It would be so much fun to enter into this kind of Talmudic analysis and kick all this stuff around for years. Probably life won’t permit it. For the moment I’ll refer to something Sarris said in “Toward a Theory of Film History” – I haven’t got the quotation, but he basically said that auteurism should be an a posteriori process. “That was a good film,” wrote Sarris, representing the filmgoer’s desired thought process. “Who directed it?”
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Hi, Dan!
I’ve been kicking this stuff around in my head ever since reading your post, “Auteurism Is a Taste, Not a Theory” (http://sallitt.blogspot.com/2009/04/trying-to-make-act-of-directing.html) and the various comments on it. There’s another Sarris quote you used there which often comes to my mind: “One kind of critic refuses to cope with a world in which a movie called Baby Face Nelson could possibly be superior to The Bridge on the River Kwai. The other kind of critic refuses to believe that a movie called Baby Face Nelson could possibly be less interesting than The Bridge on the River Kwai” (“Toward a Theory of Film History”).
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I love that BABY FACE NELSON quote, because it points at what I think the essentials of this auteurist business are. I think that it has to pertain to aesthetics, with how one likes and dislikes films. Auteurism is justified if and only if ten percent or so of film people like different movies from the other ninety percent! (The numbers can vary somewhat, and they’ll always be significantly different in France!) Otherwise it’s just about identifying stuff, which isn’t as big a deal.
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