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The Auteur Theory and Canned Soup

“There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors.”
-François Truffaut

In the current situation of world cinema, certain directors have come to become a ‘brand’. We know what the new Tarantino movie will have in it: a trunk shot, a long take and dialogue with razor-sharp wit. What about Shyamalan? A twist ending for sure! But not before 100 minutes of brooding, muted cinematography while the characters apathetically interact with each other. These are just two among the modern-day ‘auteurs’ of world cinema. Auteurs who are starting to look more like canned soup.

Let us take a quick 101 in the subject of Auteur Theory. Here’s a very concise excerpt from the Culture wiki:

“In film theory, the 1950s-era auteur theory holds that a director’s films reflect that director’s personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary “auteur” (the French word for ‘author’). In some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar “auteur” role for films that they have produced.

A present day analogy would the ‘writer-director’ and having control over the final cut or director’s cut of a film.

Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. ‘Auteurism’ is the method of analyzing films based on this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director’s work that makes her or him an auteur. Both the auteur theory and the auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical Cahiers du cinéma.”

The rise of Truffaut’s theory set up the groundwork for the French New Wave and then found itself leaking into the British New Wave and Post-Classical Hollywood movements in the UK and America respectively. The common themes that surfaced in all the new waves can be summarised as:

• Having the primary objective of breaking away from the conventional filmmaking methods and resorting to more dynamic and fluid techniques like hand-held camerawork, jump-cut editing, on-location shooting and usage of natural available light.
• Keeping the focus of the story on everyday events and seemingly unimportant matters that leave room for improvisation by the director (hence breaking the convention of having the script as the blueprint of the film).
• Leaving room for the actors to perform in a rather casual manner and allowing them to mostly improvise their performance.
• Keeping the budget and the financial requirements of the films to a bare minimum and most importantly independent of studio intervention.

The Rise of the Auteurs

The French New Wave officially kicked off in 1959 with the release of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and immediately picked up with the release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) which was co-written by Truffaut. These revolutionary feature film efforts were the product of experimentation with various short-films throughout the mid and late 1950s by these film critics-turned-filmmakers.

This was around the same time that the likes of Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsey Anderson started the new wave in Britain, the result of several documentary film projects undertaken in the 1950s as part of the Free Cinema Movement. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) were the fore-runners of the British New Wave. Interestingly, 1959 was also the year when John Cassavetes, an established Hollywood actor started his own revolution of independent cinema with the film Shadows (1959).

These revolutions leaked into other parts of the world like Germany where the likes of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders started the “New German Cinema” movement. Then the wave turned direction and headed eastwards through India with the likes of Satyajit Ray coming out as an established filmmaker with the closure of the “Apu trilogy” in 1959. The wave failed to rise to dizzy heights in the sub-continent but went onto generate a large following further east in Japan with the rise of the “Nuberu Bagu”, the localized name for the “Japanese New Wave”. Shohei Imamura is widely regarded as the key figure of this movement with a surprise association of the already established Seijun Suzuki’s certain works.

All these filmmakers mentioned above have been widely regarded as “auteurs” of their cinema by critics and audiences alike and suddenly the term had transformed the previously mechanical role of the film director into the most important and creative post on the crew. The producer’s prestige of the pre-new wave, industry-controlled era had come to a screeching halt and side-stepped to play second fiddle to the director.

Auteurs are the new Canned Soup

About 10 years into the several new waves, all audiences started turning towards auteurs and the studios were running running on empty. It was not long before, the studios sent out their pirate ants to bring in some auteurs to re-kindle their nest. Of course, the promise of a higher budget, better talent and more respect with regards to creative control of projects is appealing to even the most strictly non-commercial filmmakers.

The studios have been experimenting with auteur collaborations even while the new waves were at their peak. Jean-Luc Godard made the incredible Contempt (Le Mepris, 1963) right in the middle of the French New Wave. His reason for keeping the anti-commercial spirit alive was justified in the story of the film which deals with the evils of the studio productions and their lack of artistic value. The entire film indulges in endless irony as Godard brings out his bag of new wave tricks with the usage of jump-cuts, long takes and improvisational acting. But even Godard must’ve felt tempted- shooting in the visual richness of Technicolor with Jack Palance, Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang, a story set to the musical talents of George Delerue.

The 1970s saw the new generation of Studio-friendly auteurs in the talents of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The wonderboys of this generation went onto drive the big cars in the 1980s and were joined by James Cameron and Oliver Stone in the 1980s. A significant common thread that ran among these new “auteurs” was their lack of inclination towards the writing job and their invaluable tendency of generating breathtaking entertainment through the usage of special effects, explicit screen violence, stories with dark subjects and other larger than life techniques, all the while doing just enough to pass off as visually intelligent filmmakers.

The 1990s brought about a generation of filmmakers who rose from the VCR revolution. The likes of Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Peter Jackson and Robert Rodriguez were infamous for their undying will to make cinema on budgets lower than shoe-strings and with a clear inspiration from the new waves of the 1960s. These young filmmakers came up by watching films just as the new wave auteurs came up by writing about films. This new generation re-claimed the spirit of auteurship from the previous generation’s sudden turn towards commercialism (if only for a while) and established the grand opening of the independent cinema market.

By the early 2000s, the independent cinema market started seeing the first lights of commercial success with constant turnovers in millions. Almost every major studio started an ‘independent’ wing within its studio system to fund and acquire independent films that were more inclined towards art-house mentalities. The line between commercial flicks and independent cinema was further blurred with the advent of several key independent filmmakers crossing over into more commercial projects. The further sophistication of Digital film cameras and computer-run editing software only made it easier for a good thousand new “auteurs” to surface every passing year.

So if a film critic of the 1960s were to have gone into a cryogenic state of sleep during the new wave and if he were to awaken in the present day, what would he observe? Would he find that the artistic temperament of commercial cinema had gone up to “auteur-istic” levels or would he find that the independent cinema movement had turned out to be a parallel industry that is just another commercial venture?

Ponder that over your next can of Campbell‘s.

Posted in Essays, Film & Culture, Film Genre, Film History, World Cinema Movements | 6 Comments »