How Useful Is the Concept of the Auteur in the Context of Post-War European Cinema - Coursework Example

Post-war European national cinema, especially the French cinema, lead by the French New Wave, was creatively critical of the blatantly commercial trends in Hollywood cinema. The Auteur theory is a direct by-product of this critical attitude. No doubt, the theory had it’s origin in France. Film making in Hollywood, almost always, was more a commercial enterprise than an creative artistic ambition, in spite of the presence of such great creative stalwarts of cinema like D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Orson Wells, Robert Flaherty etc. It was the Hollywood studio system that brought about this over emphasis on the commerce of film production. This system emerged due to the increase in demand for films from Hollywood. The system evolved gradually in the years following the World War 1, which ended in 1918. To meet the demand for more movies, it focused more on quantity than on quality. It was Thomas Ince, himself a film director (Civilization, [1916] was his best known film) who conceived film production as a factory system, thus paving the way for the emergence of Hollywood studio system. Adolph Zukor, the long time head of Paramount Pictures, was another key personality who played a major role in the development of the studio system in Hollywood. He is the one who conceived the idea of the star system, which converted actors into stars and made them commercially salable icons. The studio system consisted of companies that owned the studios where films were produced. These companies decided the material to be filmed; they owned and controlled regularly paid stars who were treated like workers, (“More stars than there are in the heaven” was the motto of Metro –Goldwyn Mayer, one of the five major film producing companies in Hollywood, during it’s hey day), dictated which directors would make which films. Their motto was to produce more movies at lower cost. It was this powerful studio system that ran Hollywood from the late 20s through the 60s. Thus production process was broken down to and organized into various compartments. The producer with a budget was the central figure. Under him there were directors, Script writers, actors, technicians, mechanics, costumers, makeup men and people who took care of the publicity materials. It was an entertainment factory with clear division of labor. The production plan for every year is prepared well in advance; budget decided and the assembly line is kept flowing. EMERGENCE OF ATEURISM: The problems with the trends in Hollywood stem from the fact that they are not confined to Hollywood cinema alone. Hollywood cinema is the one that dominates and influences the cinema all over the world. The main stream national cinema in various countries starts to copy the Hollywood ways very fast, leading to the obliteration of national identities in cinema. Cinema everywhere in the world started to look alike; started to look like the photocopy of Hollywood cinema. The emergence of auteurism was a reaction to this mono tonality of cinema. The French film critic, turned film maker, Francois Truffaut (1954) in his much acclaimed article titled “A certain tendency of the French Cinema” points out to the vulgar influence of the Hollywood cinema on the French national cinema thus: “With the advent of “talkies” the French cinema was a frank plagiarism of American Cinema. Under the influence of Scarface, we made the amusing Pe’pe’ le moko. Then the French scenario is almost clearly obliged to Pre’vert for its evolution. : Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows) remains the masterpiece of poetic realism” Jacques Pre’vert was a famous French poet who wrote screenplays for French commercial cinema and Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows) is one of his successful films. Under his influence French national cinema became scenarist’s films. Some other films banked on the popularity of the star actors, thus making the star’s films as well. In this scenario of dominance of the commercial Hollywood pattern in cinema , great creative directors like Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and their films got ignored. Truffaut was advocating a shift from this commercial positioning to that of the art of cinema. He was arguing for a cinema which had the stamp of the director. He agrees to the fact that cinema is the product of an industrial process. But finally it should be not an industrial product or a mere commercial product but a work of art. Through this theory, Truffaut was trying to salvage the art of cinema from the dominance of the commerce involved in the process of production of the cinema. As Andrew Sarris ,(1976-246) one of the most ardent advocate of the Auteur theory in America puts it : “ Ultimately the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude , a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography .The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist . He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole.” Truffaut’s above mentioned article appeared in Cahiers du Cinema, the militant journal for new film movement founded by the film theorist and critic Andre Bazin in 1950. Along with Francois Truffaut, the other critics who wrote in Cahiers du Cinema, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Jean- Luc Godard started making films later and this lead to the emergence of a new film movement in the history of cinema --- The French New Wave. The most prominent auteur among them is doubtlessly Jean-Luc Godard. A study of Godard’s debut film A bout de soufflé or Breathless (1960) will explain how a director becomes the creative author or auteur of his film; how he becomes the creative force behind the film. Incidentally, A bout de soufflé is co-written by Francois Truffaut .This film subverts the Hollywood concept of cinema as a smooth flowing linear narrative. In an oft-quoted interview in Cahiers, Goddard (1962) describes his works thus: “Today I still think myself as a critic and in a sense I am., more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them.” No surprise his first film Breathless was an essay in film form. BREATHLESS, A FILM OF THE AUTEUR: The most interesting aspect of Breathless is that it is a parody of the American film genre, the Film Noir or the gangster film. Godard had chosen this Hollywood genre only to subvert its traditional structure. He ends up creating a parody of a gangster film, thus emerging as an auteur, a director who asserts on the craft of structuring his film. Breathless is about almost forty eight hours in the life of a petty criminal called Michel ( Jean Paul Belmondo ) and his romance with an American girl named Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg).The film starts with Michel stealing a car at Marseilles to drive to Paris where he is to meet Patricia. She is a Newspaper vendor who sells the Paris edition of New York Herald Tribune in the streets of Paris. They have met three weeks earlier, according to the back story revealed through dialogues and have slept a few nights together. On his way to Paris he is caught for over speeding and shoots at and kills the police man. This makes him an object of police man- hunt. In Paris he plans to collect some money he is owed by a friend and to leave to Italy with Patricia. But Patricia is confused .She wants to be a professional writer and gets her first assignment too. She doesn’t want to skip that opportunity by going after Michel, the silly criminal, though he is still very exciting to her. Finally she decides to quit him. She is so much career-driven that she has little patience to care for his future. It is she who informs the police about him leading to Michel’s arrest. Michel accepts his fate, but by then the cops come hunting him. They shoot him dead on the street. While dying Michel calls Patricia a scumbag. “What does that mean?” --- Staring at the camera Patricia asks, and turns away. The very opening sequence of the film shows the intention of the auteur director to subvert the traditional structure of the noir films. The American noir films open usually with an establishing shot of a place or a location where the story of investigation is going to happen. . But in the opening sequence of Breathless, our attention is never caught up with any plot suggestion; though in the subsequent shots we get a glimpse of the signs of a gangster film. Breathless opens on the last page of the news paper- a Paris-flirt pin up. That page carries an advertisement showing a woman in lingerie, an image which is important as far as the gender representation of the noir films is concerned. The paper falls and a man smoking a cigarette is revealed; a typical gangster film image. His stance and dress, all tell us that. If the viewer misses the point, Godard in his own way makes him mimic the historical Hollywood movie tough represented by Humphrey Bogart of the forties. Mimicking Bogart, Godard makes his hero remove the cigarette from his mouth and rub his lips with his thumb; a parody in details! (Bogart had a trade mark scar on his lips; and here is Bogart ventriloquism by Belmondo!). Right from here one sees the director intervening all the way and all throughout. The hero later steals a car from the road side and drives away. But he is stopped by a police man for speeding. He shoots down the police man and the hero runs away across a field. This is the opening sequence of Breathless. SUBVERTING THE ARCHETYPE: Five images are prominently exposed in this opening sequence. The images are that of the gangster, the girl, the car, the gun and the police. Godard (1991) once joked at the gangster films by saying that “. “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun”. Thus in the opening sequence itself the two important gangster film images – the gun and the girl – are there. But the film is not a typical gangster film or a noir film. And that is what makes Godard a different auteur. From now on Godard is purposefully subverting the film noir signs and structures. . Just after this opening sequence Michel meets the American girl, Patricia Franchini, who is the femme fatale of the film. She is so much an adventuress female that this love story is sure to be doomed as a tragic one. In noir films the lovers are never portrayed as mismatched. But here in this film they are shown as typically mismatched. Michel tells Patricia: “When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other”, making clear how mismatched they are. There is that famous long talk that Michel and Patricia have in Patricias room. During this talk their voices are almost drowned out twice by the siren of a passing ambulance. Yes, ambulance, the sign of doom! By portraying Michel and Patricia as totally mismatched, Godard in a way is subverting and modernizing the timeless romantic archetype. Godard is juxtaposing the opposites. His restless sexuality is contradicted by her almost lazy sense of power; He is a petty thief, she is a serious careerist. Even in murdering the policeman he is an accidental victim, where as even in betrayal she is purposefully resigned. Mindless innocence is juxtaposed against regretless guilt. As in light romantic comedies the relationship between Patricia and Michel is on one side, very playful with silly routines. On the other side the romantic relationship is tragic and is sure to be doomed .In the famous long scene, Michel waits for Patricia in her home for her to return. They talk, flirt, smoke, fight and finally make love. In this scene Patricia quotes Faulkner: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Michel disagrees. He says that he will choose nothing and not grief. He argues that grief is a compromise and hence nothing is better. Patricia asks Michel to compare her beauty with a Renoir poster, by sitting in front of it. He refuses to respond. Instead he sits in below a Picasso poster of a man with a mask JUMP CUT: Breathless is synonymous with Jump Cut, the very unconventional editing technique which proclaimed Godard as a definitely different auteur in world cinema. Jump cut is defined by Karl Reisz, and Gavin Millar (1989 -345) like this: “Cutting together two discontinuous parts of a continuous action without changing the set up. He cuts abruptly from one scene to another with little warning and no attempt at smoothness.” .The abrupt jumps with in the shot condense the time, while the space remains the same. Editing is invisible in the Hollywood model mainstream cinema. The more invisible the editing is, the more it serves the commercial purpose-- that is keeping the spectator immersed in the action, thus ensuring the presence of an unquestioning, undoubting witness. Gordards jump cut leaves visual gaps for the spectator to fill up mentally. Here the viewer has to assume a more critical role while viewing the film. Not only through jump cuts, but also through other devises, Godard subverts the smooth flowing realism of the Hollywood type films. In the opening sequence itself, the hero at certain point looks into the camera and tells the audience to go to hell if they can’t understand him! Hollywood model cinema runs on the screen pretending not to be conscious of the presence of the audience. It makes the audience forget their own existence. Instead Godard reminds the audience that they are there and that they are there watching his film. The fictional space and the safe anonymity of the spectator are all broken up here, creating a sort of Brechtian alienation. These provocative techniques right from the opening sequence of the Breathless invited infuriated criticism from conventionalists. Godard was accused of showing disrespect to the film language and even to the spectators. But he is not the one to be shaken. He was intentionally trying to break the traditional language of cinema, a language which made the spectator believe the unreal on the screen as real. He went on breaking the tradition, intentionally, even after Breathless. And it was Breathless, that declared the birth of a new auteur in world cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, with a very unique French New Wave film. ==================== Sources Quoted: 1) Godard Jean-Luc, interview, Cahiers du Cinema, December 1962 2) Godard Jean-luc, Journal entry, May 16, 1991 3) Reisz Karl, and Millar Gavin, Technique of Film Editing, Second Edition, Focal Press June 23, 1989 4) Sarris Andrew , Towards a Theory of Film History, Movies and Methods , Vol. 1,Ed. Bill Nichols, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993. 5) Truffaut Francois, A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, Cahiers du Cinema, no: 31, January 1954 Read More