Renoir, Howard Hawks, and Kenji Mizoguchi over Sergei Eisenstein, John Huston, and Akira Kurosawa; you disliked well-made literary adaptations of Great Books, especially when they suggested a slick, middle-brow attitude toward Art; you had a late romantic, somewhat surrealistic passion for amour fou in pictures like Gun Crazy (1949) and Vertigo (1958); you preferred low-budget films noirs such as Kiss Me Deadly (1955) over Big Productions with Important Themes such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); and you praised wide-screen, color-coded melodramas like Some Came Running instead of Academy Award–winning “little” movies like Marty (1955).
Much of the philosophical underpinnings of 1950s criticism at Cahiers derived from Bazin, the editor of the journal; but Bazin himself, who famously praised the “genius of the system” in Hollywood, was never an auteurist. Although he produced seminal writings on a number of directors (Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, William Wyler, Orson Welles, and the Italian neorealists), he chastised his younger colleagues for their habit of falling into uncritical hero worship and was explicitly disapproving of the “Hitchcocko-Hawksian” tendency in Truffaut’s work. His influence on the younger generation lay not so much in the authors he favored as in his broad historical knowledge of cinema and the arts generally, his ability to take Hollywood genres and technical developments seriously, and his keen understanding of the way style gives rise to meaning. Above all, Bazin imbued the early New Wave with a spirit of existential humanism, which placed great emphasis on the cinema’s ability to view the world from an objective standpoint. (The very word for the photographic lens in French is objectif.) He and the auteurists repeatedly favored “realistic,” “democratic,” or untendentious uses of the camera; as a result, Cahiers in the 1950s was preoccupied with wide screens, the “ethics” of mise-en-scène, and with directors who used invisible editing, long takes, or sequence shots rather than dialectical montage. Sometimes this aesthetic ideology was joined with a belief that the best American auteurs were existentialists avant la lettre. In his 1960 review of Fuller’s Verboten! (1959), for example, Truffaut describes the director of the film as if he were an action painter making instinctive or primal decisions about what should be put on the screen: “This is direct cinema, uncriticizable, irreproachable, ‘given’ cinema, rather than assimilated, digested, or reflected upon. Fuller doesn’t take time to think; it is clear that he is in his glory when he is shooting” (The Films of My Life, 108).
There was nevertheless a tension between Truffaut’s existentialist ideas, which made him sympathetic to an “open” cinema of the kind practiced by Renoir and Rossellini, and his equally strong love of genre directors like Fuller and flamboyant stylists like Welles. One of the things that attracted Truffaut to the Americans was their sense of fairy tales or pure artifice. As Leo Braudy has pointed out, Truffaut and Godard were part of a movie-obsessed generation who were hyperaware of the conventions of the medium and who “showed their involvement with the special aesthetics of film most clearly when they considered genre films—the westerns, the detective films, the musicals—in which realistic materials were used unrealistically in a structure dictated less by story than by myth.” Even when Truffaut discussed Citizen Kane, Braudy notes, “he implicitly contradicted Bazin’s assumption of realist teleology in film history by celebrating the virtues of self-conscious stylization” (Native Informant, 47).
Where the auteurists chiefly differed from Bazin was in the delirious style of their cinephilia and their tendency to place directors of pop genres or assembly-line films alongside the work of more highly respected artists. One of their favorite devices for achieving these effects was the ten-best list, which could be used as a weapon against prevailing opinion. Godard announced not only the ten best films of each year but also such things as the “Ten Best American Sound Films” and the “Six Best French Films since the Liberation.” The typical list in Cahiers contained several key works of the New Wave together with such unexpected choices as Hatari! (1962) and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Both here and in their more discursive writings, the auteurists loved to elevate the lowbrow over the middlebrow. Godard was perhaps better than anyone at the technique, as when he remarked that “an alert Frank Tashlin is worth two Billy Wilders” (35). His reviews repeatedly took on a populist quality and balanced sophistication with idealism about certain Hollywood films. In most cases, he employed a language of puns, epigrams, and breathtakingly old-fashioned pronouncements. In 1952, writing under the name “Hans Lucas,” he answered Bazin’s question “What is Cinema?” with a single phrase, basing his response on auteurs like Griffith, Flaherty, Renoir, and Hitchcock: “the expression of lofty sentiments” (31).
Was he kidding? Yes and no. Godard’s Olympian statement illustrates one of the fundamental paradoxes of auteurism. Although the movement was youthful, impetuous, and romantic, it was often dedicated to antique virtues and to praising the work of directors who were entering their twilight years. Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot (1957), Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), and Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 (1965) were all made during roughly the same period as the early films of the New Wave; but they occupied a world apart from both the current Hollywood hits and the new European art cinema, as if they were still clinging to dated formulas or dead modes of production. Few mainstream critics in the Anglo-Saxon world took them seriously, but the auteurists passionately embraced them, sometimes ranking them above the same directors’ more celebrated films of the 1930s and ‘40s. One of the most sweetly charming features of auteurism lay in its love for old pros or cinematic father figures who were still alive, making unpretentious genre movies or quiet, meditative films such as Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Truffaut, who could be devastatingly sarcastic in some contexts, was quite touching when he spoke of such films, or when he used them to rebuke current fashions.
The paradoxes or tensions I’ve been describing—between old and new, between pop and modernism, between a humanist philosophy of photographic realism and a nascent idea of cinematic écriture—are also apparent in the early films of the New Wave. Truffaut’s directorial style, for example, rises out of two apparently incompatible approaches to cinema: Renoir’s free-flowing tolerance, which breaks down generic conventions, and Hitchcock’s “murderous gaze,” which exploits generic conventions to the utmost. Godard’s Breathless employs a similar dialectic, but the effect is much more conflicted or ambivalent. A highly personal movie (at least in the intellectual sense), it gives its auteur an opportunity to identify with both Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a French wise guy who is infatuated with everything American, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), a sensitive, rather intellectual young woman from America who fears that she might be getting too deeply involved with the underworld. The two facets of the director’s imaginary identity are represented in the form of a perversely romantic and failed relationship, much like the ones in Hollywood film noir; and the relationship is echoed in a dense pattern of allusions to two different kinds of text: genre movies, mostly associated with Michel, and high-cultural literature, music, or painting, mostly associated with Patricia. The film alludes not only to Aldrich, Fuller, Budd Boetticher, Otto Preminger, and Raoul Walsh, but also to William Faulkner, Rainer Maria Rilke, Louis Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire, and William Shakespeare. Godard is the implicit source of these allusions and is therefore identified with both the man of action and the would-be artist, with both the rebel and the conformist—although it may be significant that he makes a cameo appearance (imitating Hitchcock) as a man on the street who points out Michel to the cops.
The New Wave was fostered by postmodernity, but it retained residual features of romanticism and critical modernism. However it might be described, the important point is that French success in the art theaters gave the auteurist writings of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol a special authority. By the early 1960s the movement had spread far beyond France. In England, it influenced the best critics of the period, including Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat, Victor Perkins, Peter Wollen, David Thomson, and the group of writers associated with Movie. Over the next decade it had a similar influence in America, shaping the work of critic-filmmakers Paul Schrader and Peter Bogdanovich and eventually affecting “New American Cinema.” During the 1960s, its presence was quite strong in New York, where the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas briefly provided a space for auteurist criticism in the pages of Film Culture, where select revival cinemas featured retrospectives of Hollywood auteurs, and where Film Comment
