Auteur Theory

François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock

"There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors"

François Truffaut 

One of the most fascinating concepts I came across in my progressive immersion into the world of cinema was the Auteur Theory. It's definition escaped me at the beggining (it still does), but I started to understand its emphasis on directors over particular movies. I found it illuminating because in an unconsious way I had made a transition from watching movies isolated from each other to grouping movies by director. I had started to put value on the director's name above anything else, and I began to distinguish styles and themes. I began to separate the cinema cosmos into fractions; these fractions being the directors, the auteurs.

Of course, you can separate movies by other players involved in the making of a project. Most notably, I have lately been fascinated by the cinematography of certain movies, and sometimes I group movies by the cinematographer. But this distinction is purely anecdotal, sort of speak.
I don't think the actors involved are that important. Or editors, for that matter. Or producers, etc. Not important in the sense that they (by themselves) rarely make the movie work or decide their fate. Writers, if the directors is not the writer also, can be important. All this doesn't mean the director is the key to everything. I don't think so. A movie can be a success despite the director, because he was surrounded by great editors, writers, actors, musicians, etc. (one might say this of 'Star Wars: A New Hope' (1977) and George Lucas). Bazin said: "(...) there ought to be able to exist, and there do indeed exist, brilliant strokes in the otherwise mediocre production of an auteur." At the same time, a great director can make a bad movie because the rest was a failure (and great directors can make horrible movies, such as 'Jack' (1996) and Coppola). Bazin, again, cites examples in art: "Notre-Dame de Paris is a trifle next to La Légende des siècles. Salambó isn't worth Madame Bobary, or Corydon The Counterfeiters. (...) We can admit the permanence of talent without identifying it with some artistic infallibility or some assurance against error."

The most vehement defender of the Auteur Theory is one of my favorite directors, François Truffaut. He went so far as to say that a bad movie by a great director (*an auteur) was of more importance than a good movie by a bad director (bad, or more accurately, not an auteur). "In terms of French films, [the Auteur Theory] held that any film by Cocteau or Bresson was of more interest, even if it wasn't ultimately a success, than any film by Jean Delannoy or any other director adapting a masterpiece anonymously", said Truffaut in a TV interview. There is a lot of criticism, of course, about this discourse. Even addherents of auteurism debated the extreme statement offered by Truffaut. Bazin, for example, didn't agree that a good work of art by an otherwise mediocre artist should be brushed aside: "(...) these fleeting brilliances do not in fact prove much about personal creative worth, but they are not intrinsically inferior to others for all that, and doubtless would not appear so in a criticism which did not begin by reading the signature at the bottom of the canvas." In the following paragraphs I will try to define the best I can what Auteur Theory is, how can be manifested in cinema, and what defenders and detractors have to say about it, including would-be referees, in a way, such as the great writer Andre Bazin (who published one of the most important articles regarding this concept titled 'On The Politique des Auteurs', fragments of which I have already cited).

Article which appeared, in english, in the first issue of 'Cahiers de Cinema in english'

In essence, the Auteur Theory estipulates that the director is the "author" of a film, the person that holds the vision of the movie and is the creative force behind the camera. In his short essay "The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Camera-Stylo", film critic and director Alexandre Astruc wrote: "I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo (camera-pen)." The new age of cinema, according to Astruc, meant that "the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel." In a way, Auteur Theory emerges from a deep love of cinema, from the desire of wanting cinema to be treated as any other art, and to be considered art, and not only a way of escapism and entertaintment. At the core of Auteur Theory is how a critic approaches a work of art: do you relate this piece to the body of work of an artist, or do you observe the piece in isolation, and appraise it through its own merits. Acording to auterism, the diferent movies in the body of work of a director repeats certain themes that allows the audience to access the artist (such as the themes of sex and war with Kubrick, or the generational gaps with Ozu). Certain technical approaches are also reiterated.

Not all directors are auteurs. There's an important distinction. A director is not an auteur if his films can not be distinguished from the rest. If they don't have a personal style, a unique signature. A mere director (which can be a great director) can make a good movie, but it lacks an artistic vision that defenders of this philosophy argue a film must have. In a way, as mentioned before, a film should tell you something about the director. He -the director- should not be meerly an engineer trying to make sure everything is in order... he should create a piece of art. The polemic element lays in recognizing there are often hundreds of professionals involved in the production of a movie. Auteur Theory, in a very crude way, defines all these people, some of which might be considered artists themselves (musicians, actors, cinematographers, writers, etc.), as accesories of the true artist, the director. Screenwriters, specially, have scowled at this notion since its origins. Hitchcock, one of the clearest exmples offered by the theory's advocates, states that "actors should be treated like cattle", which might exemplify how certain directors see actors as a necessary evil, sort to speak, in their movies. Kaurismaki or Bresson insist that their actors should not act theatrically, in a way eliminating the influence or interference of other artists into their vision. About this (Bresson and his actors) Truffaut wrote: "We know that Bresson directs his actors by holding them back from acting "dramatically," from adding emphasis, forcing them to abstract from their "art". (...) favouring amateurs chosen for their appearance -and also their "spirit- new creatures who don't bring any habits with them, or false spontaneity, bringing, in fact, no "art" at all." Truffaut goes on, talking about the use of actors by Bresson, which is a fascinating enough subject (the different approaches directors have toward the acting in their movies) to warren a new post for this specific topic. Others are obsessive over minute details, controlling everything from sound to editing.

François Truffaut

Another polemic element to this theory is the idea that a great movie by a director that is not an auteur cannot be considered a piece of art, or that it is less valuable. Again, a common reply was that good movies can be made without directors, or by bad directors, or by merely techically competent directors. I do believe one could make a good movie, or even a masterpiece, by pure chance, if one were competent enough not to sabotage its own accidental success. Andrew Sarris, in his essay "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962", wrote: "Nowadays, it is possible to become a director without knowing too much about the technical side, even the crucial functions of photography and editing. An expert production crew could probably cover up for a chimpanzee in the director's chair. How do you tell the genuine director from the quasichimpanzee? After a given number of films, a pattern is established." Evidence supports this theory fairly consistently.

A good director with freedom to provide his own style to a movie rarely makes a bad movie, then, according to defenders of the theory. But actors, for example, have to be very careful choosing which movie to take part in. They can give the performance of their life, but the movie might still be a flop, because most elements escape their capacity to influence them. They have little control on how the movie develops stylistically (unless you are Marlon Brando and decide what the director can or cannot do). A good viewer can distinguish polished acting in a bad movie. Or great cinematography in an otherwise absurd movie. One should have the ability to analyse which elements of a movie work or not, separately. But it is not separately, though, that the movie is shown to us, the audience. It is the director the sole composer and orchestra director, metaphorically. Editors, later on, can also play a fundamental part in arranging (and even saving) a film. But if the director has not make sure that his vision (if he has a clear vision of what he wants do do -and an auteur most certainly has-) is being carried out the way his mind envisions it, not even the greatest editor could salvage it. It is important to remind ourselves that often the directo- scratch that... the auteur will take part in the editing process to make sure the movie fits his vision, rather than the the natural way of editing or the demands of the producers, or the public. An auteur will chose the music, will correct artist, etc. He doesn't want to make a movie, or even a good and/or succesfully commercial movie, he wants to make his movie.

The shortcoming of this type of movie criticism are obvious. Bazin stated: "(...) the politique des auteurs is without the most perilous of critiques, for its criteria are very difficult to formulate. (...) It is unfortunate to praise wrongly a work which does not merit it, but the risk is less disastrous than to reject an estimable film because its maker has not up until now produced anything good." This criticism was later underlined by Pauline Kael in the famed 15-page essay criticism on the Auteur Theory "Circles and Squares": "If his aesthetics is based on expediency, then it may be expedient to point out that it takes extraordinary intelligence and discrimination and taste to use any theory in the arts, and that without those qualities, a theory becomes a rigid formula (which is indeed what is happening among auteur critics).", and then added "The greatness of critics like Bazin in France and Agee in America may have something to do with their using their full range of intelligence and intuition, rather than relying on formulas. Criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see." To round off her despise for the Auteur Theory, she called its proponents "connoiseurs of trash". Her criticism focused, among other things, about the hypocrisy that arises by discarting the great film of a director that has no other work to his name, or the constant justification of bad movies by good filmakers that are considered auteurs by a certain sphere of critics. She also question the ability of these critics to separate which directors deserve the label of auteurs and who doesn't. Going over the same themes and styles over exploration, she argues, might not mean precisely a mark of genius: "Repetition without development is decline." This trend of auterism can lead to filmmakers becoming entrapped in their own style, and the public or critics to punish creative escapades by established directors.

André Bazin

Bazin added another a question: "How is a piece of art affected if we don't know who the author is?". He questions whether this strips the piece of any value, as the author is missing. But a piece of art is not just "made" by an artist, it is also created by the influences that have shaped the artists themselves.

Artistic movements shape artist. Society shapes artists. But cinema has been alive for shorter than other artistics forms, so the fire inside an auteur burns ten times faster, as Bazin put it, and his signature can be more clearly distinguished because there is no current that can engulf his individuality (or, in Bazin's words, to cease being carried by the wave). Nowadays, cinema is old enough to have books written about its history. I don't think this impossibilates there being auteurs today. Maybe their individuality is diminished and their films are filled with refences and inspirations found in old movies and the technical abilities are greater, thus eliminating the need to learn via trial-and-error (which might be the best way to learn; Orson Welles said, about 'Citizen Kane', that ignorance was what gave him the confidence to make the movie, and that "only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful"), but the utterance of such names as Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, or Tarantino would refute the claim that there are no auteurs today. What can't be denied is that (situation) forced earlier filmmakers to be much more innovative and ground-breaking. It is also true, that cinema is the artistic endevour more endangered by external meddling and manipulation. Producers can have the final say in a lot of executive decisions that might hinder the auteur vision. "The act of veritable artistic creation finds itself more uncertain and menaced than elsewhere", wrote Bazin. He said, nonetheless, that "In fact, not even the most individualistic artistic disciplines is free and always equal to itself."

Lately, a new label has appeared: "Vulgar Auterism", which was coined by Andrew Tracy. There are certainly a lot of branches stemming from the Auteur Theory discussion, including its relation to male directors sexual fantasies, or its origin, which might be interesting to read and write about... some other day.

The debate over auteurism is far from concluded. It seems that most critics and film enthusiast today reject the extreme claims made by Truffaut and his peers at 'Cahiers du Cinema' -which have been described as an "anti-art" approach to cinema-, but its impact remains entrenched into spectators today. It still feels, nonetheless, like a hunch, an instinctual approach to making sense of the infiniteness of cinema. After all, it feels somehow dangerous, even simplistic, but it is one of the best guides to navigate Cinema. I feel it is helpful, too, to remind ouselves that the first proponents of auterism wanted to make a distinction between craftmen that cared deeply about the importance of cinema as an art and directors that merely approached movie-making as any other job, creating a product of entertainment.

Andre Bazin ended his essay with the question: "Auteur, without doubt. But of what?"

Sources used:

"On the Politique des Auteurs", André Bazin
"A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema", François Truffaut
"The birth of a new avant-garde: La caméra-stylo", Alexandre Astruc
"Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962", Andrew Sarris
"Circles and Squares", Pauline Kael