Auteur theory research

The Origin of the Auteur theory in France

• The Auteur Theory originated in france, initially known as "Le Politique des Auteurs".


• A left wing intellectual and film maker in post-war France, Alexandre Astruc, wrote an article named "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: la Caméra-Stylo", 1948, constructing the theory.


• This named the film maker as an artist.


• During the war, Americans had developed light-weight 16mm cameras - making it possible for small groups to create films, as well as the big studios.


• Combined with television, film making was now becoming available to many- like it had never been before.


• After the war, Hollywood films could be seen in France.


• The Politique des Auteurs was established to show film making as an art, serious, and to support its quality.


• André Bazin resisted this theory, and felt that the film maker should be seen as passively recording the real world, not constructing and manipulating it. - However hypocritically, he was a fan of Hollywood directors Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.


• Bazin criticised that the work could be ascribed to an "auteur" if they had never been part of the history of film or society.


• "Bazin's criticism of the politique was perceptive" (The Cinema Book, Pam Cook & Mieke Bernink, 1994)


• "Metteurs-en-scene" - discussions began about directors of film and true auteurs who have a uniquelly individual style in their film making.


• Bazin again criticised that mise-en-scene shouldn't reflect the director but the film itself, to allow the meaning of the film to be expressed.

The History of the Auteur Theory in America

• In the '40's and '50's, the "best films" were social realism films, with commertial films not being classed as "quality".


• In the '50's, Hollywood started selling old movies to television, so people could see earlier work of directors who were at their peak at the time.


• In the late '50's/early 60's, Andrew Sarris, writing for "The Villiage Voice", and "Film Culture" began arguing for the Auteur theory, as well as that cinema and it's mass audience were declining.


• In 1960's, Sarris's critical polemic was against social realism and in favour of "the art of popular cinema".


• Coming out of the Golden Era, the director became a criterion of value, rather than the star - which lead to the decline in the Hollywood Studio System, where stars were used as products rather than people, tied down by contracts to be a certain person who acts a certain way to give off a false image designed by the Studios. - This meant a growth in small-scale production facilities.


• "Many artisrs in America began experimenting with 16mm film after the war. Thus some of the social conditions which gave rise to the french "politique des auteurs" also contributed to the emergence of the auteur theory in America." (The Cinema Book, Pam Cook & Mieke Bernink, 1994)
• Andrew Sarris was responsible for introducing politique des auteurs, translating it to auteur theory, and expanding it to evaluating/classifying Hollywood cinema.
• Auteur theory was a way to evaluate films according to the directors technical competence, talent, and distict visual style.
• Sarris altered his theory to limit it only to Hollywood directors and some others who had influenced them.
• He didn't belittle those others who worked on the films, but found the director most important in the work.
• "After years of tortured revaluation, I am now prepared to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on the proposition that Alfred Hitchcock is artistically superior to Robert Bresson by every criterion of excellence, and further, that, film for film, director for director, the American cinema has been consistantly superior to that of the rest of the world from 1915 throught 1962. Consequently, I now regard the auteur theory primarily as a critical device for recording the history of the American cinema, the only cinema in the world worth exploring in depth beneath the frosting of a few great directors at the top." (Sarris, 1962/63)