Film d’auteur
Film Art
We could make this publication thanks to small donations. How is 3 minutos de arte supported?
Film d’auteur (Auteur cinema)
The term is commonly used to refer to cinema filmed by a director with a well-defined, very personal, and unique style, distinguishable from any other type of cinema. In the film, the director’s gaze is evident.
We like to state that, in general, art happens when an artist creates a universe and invents their own language to communicate it. In this sense, then, auteur cinema is the true art cinema (or the most “artistic” of all cinema). It is the cinema that has such essential characteristics, such a particular vision of the universe, and such a personal language that allows us to recognize its author in an evident way.
Cinema in general is an “art” with a very big conditioning factor: the cost of the films. In general, the financing of a film has more to do with an investment than with a philanthropic act (which means “for the love of humanity”). In filmmaking, new approaches are sought, but in general, the formulas that have already proven successful are preferred.
Although we can find examples of what we now call “auteur cinema” since the beginning of cinema, the subject became a theory in the late 1940s.
In 1948, Alexandre Astruc, a screenwriter and director, wrote an article titled “Birth of a New Avant-garde: the Caméra-Stylo” for the iconic film magazine L’Ecran français. Caméra-Stylo is a theoretical concept that predicted that the cinema would gradually free itself from the “tyranny of the image,” or from what is definite and immediate, from simple and direct language, to become a means of expression just as flexible and subtle as written language.
And in 1954, in the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, where the directors who would end up revolutionizing cinema with the Nouvelle Vague (the new wave) collaborated as critics, Truffaut wrote an article called A Certain Tendency in French Cinema, where he introduced the concept of “auteur politics,” (the policy of the authors), the definitive birth of the theory of auteur.
What is Truffaut talking about? He precisely makes a cult of creative individuality, in a world like cinema where the result is usually the work of a huge number of people. He provocatively states that, as a collective work, perhaps cinema should not be considered an art. He considers that the “auteur” is the director who imposes his personal view on all the fundamental steps of the creation of a film, even from the very conception of the idea and the writing of the script. The director, who is not an “auteur,” who is given a script and is in charge of filming it, is considered to be merely a “stager.” He is not an artist. What he does is not art.
“The policy of the authors” is a new way of looking at and evaluating films that has to do with the director’s creativity and worldview. Truffaut stated: “There are no good and bad films, only good and bad directors.”
Image: Anna Karina in a scene of Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live,) Jean-Luc Godard, 1962
Some examples of directors/auteurs (pre and post theory): Chaplin, Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir, Rosellini, Orson Welles, Cocteau, Max Ophüls, Man Ray, Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, John Ford, Fellini, Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard, Kurosawa, Coppola, Woody Allen, Spielberg, Scorsese, Brian de Palma, David Lynch, Almodóvar, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson (we insist: these are just some examples)
Recommended links:
Charles Chaplin and his character Charlot.
Georges Méliès and the Magic of the Cinema.
The Best American Movies in History according to the American Film Institute.
You can also find more material using the search engine.
Would you like to support 3 minutos de arte?
Our project.
0 Comments