Despite the term “auteur theory,” the practice of writing about movie directors has never been a true theory; it simply assumes the importance of directors and takes the form of practical criticism that can be done well or badly. But the discourse on the director-as-author has always been problematic, in part because of the industrial basis of the medium, but also because film directors began to be called “auteurs” in the 1950s and ‘60s, at the moment when the rise of theory in the academy was about to make authorship in general an embattled concept. During those years, the French politique des auteurs, or “policy” of canonizing favored directors, served as background for debates surrounding authorship in cinema. To make sense of the debates, we first need to make a distinction between writing about movie directors as authors—a practice as old as the feature film—and the more historically situated phenomenon called “auteurism.”
AUTEURISM
As its suffix implies, auteurism was a kind of aesthetic ideology or movement. Like other movements in art history, it was generated by what Raymond Williams terms a “cultural formation”—a loose confederation of critics and artists (in this case made up almost entirely of white males) who had roughly similar objectives and who developed a body of polemical writing to justify their opinions. Such formations are especially important to modernity. As Williams notes, they’re typically centered in a metropolis, at points of “transition and intersection” within a complex social history; and the individuals who both compose and are composed by them always have a “range of diverse positions, interests and influences, some of which are resolved . . . , others of which remain as internal differences” (Culture, 85–86). Formations also tend to be ephemeral, spinning off into individual careers or breakaway movements but disseminating their ideas widely, leaving more or less permanent traces on the general culture.
Auteurism fits the profile of a modern cultural formation almost perfectly. It originated in Paris during the 1950s, at a moment when enthusiasm for American cinema was being voiced by several groups, including the left critics at Positif and the right critics at the “MacMahonist” Présence du cinéma. The most influential collective in those years, and the one most identified with auteurism, was at Cahiers du cinéma, but this group was more heterogeneous than it seemed; several members were Catholic, and their politics ranged from conservative to socialist. To some extent they resembled the historical avant-garde of the 1910s and ‘20s: they possessed a “left bank” aura; they made iconoclastic and at least mildly shocking value judgments; their ideas were articulated in a specialized magazine; they embraced certain elements of pop culture and used them to attack bourgeois values; they published manifestos, such as François Truffaut’s “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”; and their group label served as a kind of banner to help publicize their early work.
The last point is important because many of the auteurists, including Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, were fledgling directors. Their call for “personal” cinema had been inspired to some extent by Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 essay “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” published in the socialist journal L’Écran français, which spoke metaphorically of the camera as a pen, the screen as a piece of paper, and the director as an author. Astruc, who was both a novelist and a director, emphasized the inscribable or lisable properties of mise-en-scène, locating them in the gestures of actors, the performance of dialogue, the movement or framings of the camera, and the interaction or relationship between objects and persons. The auteurists strongly supported such ideas and gave them apparent practical application by moving from critical writing into filmmaking. Meanwhile, their reviews and essays were filled with flamboyant descriptions of directors as existentialist authors. Godard remarked apropos of Ingmar Bergman, “The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page” (Godard on Godard, 76). Truffaut, speaking of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, declared, “It is easy to picture its author as a man overflowing with vitality, as much at ease behind a camera as Henry Miller facing a blank page” (The Films of My Life, 94).
As Godard amusingly observed, “Nothing could be more classically romantic” (76). But neither Godard nor auteurism can be so easily pigeonholed. To appreciate why, we need only look at a couple of paragraphs from Godard’s Cahiers review of the 1958 Douglas Sirk film A Time to Love and a Time to Die, starring John Gavin and Liselotte Pulver:
I am going to write a madly enthusiastic review of Douglas Sirk’s latest film, simply because it sets my cheeks afire. . . . In the first place I shall refer . . . to Griffith’s True-Heart Susie, because I think one should mention Griffith in all articles about the cinema: everyone agrees, but everyone forgets none the less. Griffith, therefore, and André Bazin, too, for the same reasons; and now that is done, I can get back to . . . A Time to Love and a Time to Die. . . . But here I pause for a moment to say that, next to Le Plaisir, this is the greatest title in all cinema, sound or silent, and also to say that I heartily congratulate Universal-International on having changed the title of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, which was called A Time to Live and a Time to Die. . . . By replacing the word “live” by “love,” they implicitly posed the director the question—an admirable starting-point for the script—“Should one live to love, or love to live?” And now, having finished my detour and comparisons: a time to love and a time to die—no, I shall never tire of writing these new, still imperturbably new, words, A Time to Love and a Time to Die: you know very well that I am going to talk about this film as I do about friend Fritz or Nicholas Ray, about You Only Live Once or They Live by Night, as though, in other words, John Gavin and Liselotte Pulver were Aucassin and Nicolette in 1959.
This, anyhow, is what enchants me about Sirk: this delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied Cinemascope. Obviously one must talk about all this as Aragon talks about Elsa’s eyes, raving a little, a lot, passionately, no matter, the only logic which concerns Sirk is delirium. (135–36)
This is a far cry from academic criticism and belies some of the assertions often made about auteurism. It’s customary (and not incorrect) to say that the young Cahiers critics were romantics—as when Thomas Schatz, in his valuable book The Genius of the System, tells us that auteurism “would not be worth bothering with if it hadn’t been so influential, effectively stalling film history in a prolonged stage of adolescent romanticism” (5). Many contemporary writers would agree; but if we’re going to call Godard a romantic, we should recognize that he’s a strange variant of the type. His review reads more like a wild, calculated mime of the “delirium” he finds in Sirk’s film; it’s a parody or pastiche of romantic gestures, a “madly enthusiastic” account of “Aucassin and Nicolette in 1959.”
One quality of parody is that we can’t always tell when it’s a full-out mockery. When Joyce opens the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses by writing, “The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace,” is he joking about the conventions of popular romance or acknowledging the seductive power of a certain kind of language? Is he engaging in a ventriloquist’s act or taking pleasure in “bad writing,” allowing his novel to become the thing it mimics? Godard’s review has exactly this sort of ambiguity, and if I were to quote it at length in the original French we would discover that it contains Joycean puns. (At one point, he derides “tous ces René qui n’ont pas les idées claires.”) He therefore resembles the modernists as much as the romantics. But he also has something in common with the historical avant-garde, which tended to welcome machine-made culture and its utopian possibilities. Like many of the auteurists, he’s in love with Cinemascope; at a later point in his review he disputes what he calls the “fashionable” idea that “the wide screen is all window dressing” and remarks that Sirk’s camera movements “give the impression of having been done by hand instead of with a crane, rather as if the mercurial brushwork of a Fragonard were the work of a complex machine.” Throughout, he employs a familiar avant-garde strategy: he appropriates a high-culture style and turns it on its head; he half-comically apes the conventions of “serious” criticism (“I
