Auteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as
if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for
"author").
In spite of—and
sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an industrial
process, the auteur's creative voice is distinct enough to shine through all
kinds of studio interference and through the collective process.
Auteur theory has
influenced film criticism since 1954, when it was advocated by film director
and critic François Truffaut. This method of film analysis was originally associated
with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the French film
review periodical Cahiers du Cinéma. Auteur theory was developed a few years later in America
through the writings of The Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris. Sarris used auteur theory as a way to further the analysis of
what defines serious work through the study of respected directors and their
films.
The auteur theory
says that the director of a music video can add their own style to it so it is
distinctive to them. It is saying that these videos can be seen to be made from
a certain director by the style they have been made in. This then gives the
impression that they were the author (auteur) as it is very well linked.
This could be difficult to create as the director may not
have full control over the video and what’s being shown as the industry itself
will have people above them telling them what to show.
The auteur theory can be seen from 1954 in film criticism as
film director and critic François Truffaut. he used this and from then on it was used
,and in America it was used a few years later with writings such as Andrew
Sarris.
An Auteur is a film director who
establishes a particular style and uses it in most or all of his or her films;
the director’s creative voice is particularly distinctive.
Auteur theory draws on the work of a group of cinema
enthusiasts who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma and argued that films should reflect a director's
personal vision. They championed filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Jean Renoir are known as absolute 'auteurs'
of their films. Although André Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers, provided a
forum for Auteurism to flourish, he explained his concern about its excesses in
his article "On the Auteur Theory" (Cahier # 70, 1957). Another
element of Auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or
"camera-pen," which encourages directors to wield cameras as writers
use pens and to guard against the hindrances of traditional storytelling.
Truffaut and the
members of the Cahiers recognized that movie-making was an
industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for, encouraging
the director to use the commercial apparatus as a writer uses a pen, and,
through the mise en scène, imprint his or her vision on the work (minimizing the role of
the screenwriter). Recognizing the difficulty of reaching this ideal, they
valued the work of directors who came close.
The definition of an
Auteur was debated upon since the 1940s. Andre Bazin and Roger Leenhardt
presented the theory that it is the director that brings the film to life and
uses the film to express their thoughts and feelings of the subject matter as
well as a world view as an auteur. An auteur can use lighting, camerawork,
staging and editing to add to their vision.[2] Michel Foucault wrote a literary piece called 'What is an
author?" which contributes to the Auteur Theory. The text refers to the
"author function," an idea connected to the legal system concerning
who owns the text. This theory has become more complex than just attribution.
According to Foucault, "author" does not refer to just a real
individual but rather as an alter ego of an actual person. "author"
is too narrow of a definition for some who Foucault calls "founders of
discursivity".
In his 1954 essay
"Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("A certain tendency
in French cinema"), François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des
Auteurs", asserting that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be
more interesting than the best of the movies of Jean Delannoy. "Politique" might very well be translated as
"policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to
value and look at films in a certain way. One might see it as the policy of
treating any director that uses a personal style or a unique world view as an
Auteur. Truffaut criticized the Cinema of Quality as "Scenarists'
films", which are works that lack originality and rely on literary
classics. According to Truffaut, this means that the director is only a metteur
en scene, a "stager". This tradition suggests that the
screenwriter hands the script to the director and the director simply adds the
performers and pictures.[3] Truffaut provocatively said: "(t)here are no good and
bad movies, only good and bad directors".
Truffaut's article,
by his own admission, dealt primarily with scenarists or screenwriters,
precisely the screenwriting duo Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who, Truffaut believed,
simplified and compromised many of the great works of French literature in
order to support the political agenda of their day. In Truffaut's article, he
references the director Claude Autant-Lara's characterization of his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh as an "anti-war"
book, citing the problem that the book pre-dated the Second World War. Truffaut
applied the term "auteur" to directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson, who, aside from exerting their distinct style, wrote the
screenplays or worked on the writing of screenplays of their films.
In its embryonic
form, the auteur theory dealt with the nature of literary adaptations and
Truffaut's discomfort with the screenwriters Aurenche's and Bost's maxim that
any film adaptation of a novel should capture the spirit of the novel and deal
only with its "filmable" aspects. Truffaut believed that film
directors like Robert Bresson were able to use the film narrative to approach
even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes. To support this assertion, he
used the film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country
Priest.
Much of the writing
of Truffaut and his colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers
du cinéma was designed to lambaste not only the post-war French cinema but especially the big production films of the cinéma
de qualité ("quality films"). Truffaut's circle referred to
these films with disdain as sterile, old-fashioned cinéma de papa (or
"Dad's cinema"). During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did not allow the exhibition of U.S. films
such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. In 1946, when French film critics were finally able to see the
1940s U.S. movies, they were enamoured with these films.
Truffaut's theory
maintains that a good director (and many bad ones) exerts such a distinctive
style or promotes such a consistent theme that his or her influence is
unmistakable in the body of his or her work. Truffaut himself was appreciative
of directors whose work showed a marked visual style (such as Alfred Hitchcock)
as well as those whose visual style was less pronounced but whose movies
reflected a consistent theme (such as Jean Renoir's humanism). Truffaut et
al. made the distinction between auteurs and 'metteurs en scene', the latter not being described as inferior directors making
inherently poor films, just lacking the authorial signature.
The auteur
theory was used by the directors of the nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement of French cinema in the 1960s (many of
whom were also critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma) as justification
for their intensely personal and idiosyncratic films. One of the ironies of the
Auteur theory is that, at the very moment Truffaut was writing, the break-up of
theHollywood studio system during the 1950s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and
conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of
films Truffaut admired were actually being made.
The
"auteur" approach was adopted in English-language film criticism in the 1960s. In the UK, Movie adopted
Auteurism, while in the U.S., Andrew Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory
in 1962". This essay is where the term, "Auteur theory",
originated. To be classified as an "auteur", according to Sarris, a
director must accomplish technical competence in their technique, personal
style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior meaning (although
many of Sarris's auterist criteria were left vague[citation needed]). Later in the
decade, Sarris published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions,
1929–1968, which quickly became the unofficial bible of auteurism.
The auteurist
critics—Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer—wrote mostly about directors, although they also produced some
shrewd appreciations of actors. However later Truffaut wrote: the auteur theory
"was started by Cahiers du Cinema and is forgotten in France, but still
discussed in American periodicals."
Starting in the
1960s, some film critics began criticising auteur theory's focus on the
authorial role of the director. Pauline Kael and Sarris feuded in the pages of The New Yorkerand various film magazines.[4][5] One reason for the backlash is the collaborative aspect of
shooting a film, and in the theory's privileging of the role of the director
(whose name, at times, has become more important than the movie itself). In
Kael's review of Citizen Kane, a classic film for the auteur model, she points out how
the film made extensive use of the distinctive talents of co-writer Herman J.
Mankiewicz and
cinematographer Gregg Toland.[6] But Kael's objections to the "auteur theory" were
many and are best learned by reading her essay "Circles and Squares".
Notable screenwriters
such as Ernest Lehman,[7] Nicholas Kazan,[8] Robert Riskin[9] and William Goldman[10] have publicly balked at the idea that directors are more
authorial than screenwriters, while film historian Aljean Harmetz, referring to the creative input of producers and studio
executives in classical Hollywood, argues that the auteur theory
"collapses against the reality of the studio system".[11]
The auteur theory was
also challenged by the influence of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism. The New Critics argued that critics made an "intentional fallacy" when they tried to interpret works of art by
speculating about what the author meant, based on the author's personality or
life experiences. New Critics argued that that information or speculation about
an author's intention was secondary to the words on the page as the basis of
the experience of reading literature.[citation needed]
In 2006, David Kipen
coined the term Schreiber theory to refer to the theory of the screenwriter as the principal
author of a film.[12]
Can you find an
example of your own?
Fred and nick
are a pair who direct several Mumford and sons videos (the cave, I will wait,
gentlemen of the road) and also people such as the vaccines and Laura manning.
They are linked to our genre as they do lots of work with Mumford and sons and
other indie groups (the Maccabees, the vaccines) and also work with pop groups
such as take that showing there is a new trend with what people want to see and
music but also in there adverts as they have done adverts for companies like
Vodafone and match.com along with Nike showing a link with what people want to
see.
How is this director
an Auteur?
The directors Fred and Nick create many music videos all with a
distinctive feeling throughout them all. A lot of his videos are in a live
setting like you are there and also they are not covered with a story, instead
they can clearly be seen singing throughout. When there is a live vibe going
throughout it is in a darker setting and they are performing in such videos as
take that-patience and Mumford and sons – will wait and gentlemen of the road.
They use the same style and is now flowing over into adverts as it’s what
people want to see. If they do not use this style they may also use colours
such as black and white or make it looked washed out (take that) so that it
looks a little more darker. It still looks real and natural but it may also
feel like it is imaginary at the same time, giving a mysterious feel to the
whole video.
What music videos
have they made that express their view point?
They have made many
music videos, especially for indie bands (the Maccabees, Mumford and sons, the
vaccines). They use the same principle as said above and make this work
throughout. They either use a live setting or feeling or they use low contrast
colours and make it still look live, but in all videos they have somebody
singing throughout. They also have made adverts and they use the latter
principle of using low contrast colours and no singing behind the back etc. it
is all seen in the camera shot constantly. They want to make it feel like you
are there and make it seem realistic to the average watcher.
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