La Politique des Auteurs& Authorship

UJMB3024 Film Appreciation, Criticism & Interpretation

Auteurism

Originally known as “la politique des auteurs”.

Mistranslated by Andrew Sarris as “Auteur Theory”.

Brief History of AuteurismFirst started in the 1920s in France, where film critics and directors wrote about in theoretical writings.

But the term “author’s film” was already coined in 1913 in Germany – Autorenfilm – as film art movement catered to the middle class.

Autorenfilm credits the scriptwriter for the film, not the director.

Brief History of AuteurismIn 1920s, the French claimed that author should be the director, i.e. the filmmaker, irrespective of who wrote the script.

This ‘new’ version of authorship partakes in the distinctive stratification of high art / low art issues.

Allowing auteur-films to be valued as much or more than literary adaptations and popular fictions.

Brief History of AuteurismBy 1954, the French called for a complete opinion of authorship, ignoring or dismissing previous ideas on the theory.

This version is the one taken on by film studies.

This auteur theory links “mise-en-scene” closely to the role of the directors.

La Politique des AuteursA theory* (policy, polemic) derived by French film critics, more specifically, Francois Truffaut of Cahiers du Cinema, in the 1950s.

Put into practice by directors of French New Wave between 1959-1968.

The manifesto of Cahiers du Cinema is found in Truffaut’s essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”

La Politique des AuteursIn Truffaut’s essay, he criticizes that the dominant tendency of French Cinema in the 1940s and 50s incorporates a “tradition of quality” where the cinema portrays a bourgeois image of good taste and high cultured values. Tradition of quality = high production values + reliance on stars + genre conventions + privileging the script

Truffaut further states: “This value offers a mechanical transfer of the script to the screen, emphasizing a strong dependence on the quality of the scripts”.

La Politique des AuteursWho are some of the auteurs?

Alfred Hitchcock Orson Welles John Ford

What constitutes an auteur? Going against literature – does not honour the script

Film style

La Politique des AuteursFilm style:

Manipulating mise-en-shot Exerting control over mise-en-scene Script can remain but intensified to create meaning using at least one or all production techniques.

An auteur in a Hollywood studio system = director who transcends the script by imposing his or her style and vision, blending subjective and personalized filmmaking practices.

La Politique des AuteursAuteur theory aims to distinguish directors as artists and directors as technicians.

An auteur is a director who displays his/her style and vision consistently across his/her films.

Under the theory, the director visualizes the script onto the screen.

The theory attacks the traditional way of filmmaking, particularly on the dependence of the script.

The theory honours American directors who transcend script, enforcing their style and vision.

The film critics of the theory materialized their auteur visions by enforcing them onto their own films in the 60s (French New Wave).

AuteurismDespite theory’s concern, it disregarded context, i.e. historical, ideological content?

By 1960s, the concept of structuralism strained the theory and called for a ‘rethinking’ – an effect caused by other disciplines namely structural linguistics and semiotics.

By the 1970s, ‘rethinking’ was again needed for the theory with the introduction of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

AuteurismTherefore, problems/issues were identified via theories across disciplines on cinema.

Impact of these theories generated the notion that one single theory is inadequate to read a film.

A group of theories usually needed to discuss a particular film.

This group of theories that created the impact: post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism & deconstruction.

Phase 1: 1950s Politique des auteurs

AUTEUR Central Producer of meaning

Nothing else, where is spectator, ideology, context?

Phase 2: 1960s Structuralism

STRUCTURES: Auteur Linguistic Social institution

All producing meaning

Underlying structures of texts but still no spectator or ideology.

Phase 3: 1960s Post-structuralism

Text / Ideology

Semiotics Psychoanalysis feminism Deconstruction

Context / Intertextuality

Paradigm that makes possible establishment of parameters to show what the texts and subjects are doing and how the interplay produces meanings.

Auteur

Spectator

Janet Staiger’s “Authorship Approaches”

1. Authorship as origins2. Authorship as personality3. Authorship as sociology of

production4. Authorship as signature5. Authorship as reading strategy6. Authorship as site of

discourses7. Authorship as technique of the

self

1. Authorship as origins

Interested in author’s intent with the production, uninterrupted (by external factors) philosophically or linguistically.

The author is a free agent and the message is an expression of the author. Writing is the flow of the author’s morality onto the page.

The author’s biography is useful during evaluation.

Interpretation is free-willed and author’s content/ideas may be deemed vice, which brought about issues surrounding the concept of evaluation based on intent.

2. Authorship as personality

The difference from the former one is that there is an opening for problems in free agency. The author is not a fully conscious agent but ideally, a coherent personality.

Interested in the author’s personality transcended onto the film, privileging feelings-led elements, rather than ideas.

Allows films to be viewed as art, where individuals’ aesthetics and insights are imprinted into the films.

“Auteur theory” is an authorship as personality and auteur debate in France can be seen through this lens. The author is the creative source of the meaning.

3. Authorship as sociology of productionValues artistic integrity of anyone in production who has control, impact or influences of production.

Not just director’s vision is valued: actors, editors, cinematographers, studio execs, producers, etc.

Impact contributors looked upon as collaborators.Authors are workers and they produce messages as a consequence of their production experience.

There are both “liberal” and “critical” versions of this approach. Based on Marxist literature, the critical version examines the production and the role of the worker in the production, which has “features such as division of skills, routinized work sequences, and hierarchies of power by which the mode extracts surplus value from the employees.” (Staiger, 2003)

4. Authorship as signature

Author is a kind of signature in the text, known by repetition among the various texts signed by a historical person.

Relooks at the director as author, singling out production traits and styles across the various films as his/her signature.

Repetition in production styles and themes is key.

The author is a structure within discourses. Author-structuralism is one example of this kind of approach.

5. Authorship as reading strategy

Assumes reader as the author = reader’s interpretation is key.

Barthes said “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the author” = any integral meaning placed within a text is lost, awaiting readers to process the signifiers, according to the readers’ subjective standpoint.

The reader produces a representation of the author during interpretation. This is simply a reading strategy, and there is no need to discuss agency and biography from this point of view.

This kind of approach tries to solve the problems of author-structuralism – that is, the effect of the individual subject on the forced importance of author-code.

6. Authorship as site of discoursesThis approach takes on more than one discourse and assumes both the director and reader to be external entities, leaving the text as the sole signifier.

The author is neither an individual nor an agent, but rather a site of discourses. This entity has a historical body without agency, continuity or significance. The author is a tablet upon which and through which culture writes its historical discourses.

This allows the styles of the director to co-exist with the interpretation of the reader.

Post-structuralist approaches can be categorized under this approach.

7. Authorship as technique of the selfThe previous, values the text but not speaker of the text. Thus, voice of author = heard & expressed.

Here, author performs as an author and expresses his/her voice within the text, while the readers (culture) is aware that there’s such an expression appearing within the text.

The author is seen as a subject hired to perform a statement repeatedly across films, thus exercising his/her authoring ability.

This kind of approach has its origins in Michel Foucault’s writings. The relationship between power and resistance is an important figure for Foucault: “where there is power, there is resistance”.

Foucault’s theory inspired feminist and queer cinema. Feminist filmmaking is thereby framed as an author practice, not in terms of the individual author, but in terms of author as technique of the self.