art cinema

view of events; social realism is represented by the character in

relation to those events. The point of view can take the form of an
interior monologue, or even several interior monologues (Alain
Resnais’s and Ingmar Bergman’s films are exemplars of this).
Subjectivity is often made uncertain (whose ‘story’ is it?) and so
too the safe construction of time and space. This cinema, in its
rupture with classic narrative cinema, intentionally distances
spectators to create a reflective space for them to assume their own
critical space or subjectivity in relation to the screen or film.

aspect ratio This refers to the size of the image on the screen and to the
ratio between the width and height. It dates back to the days of
silent cinema, when the ratio was fixed at 1.33:1 (width to height)
thanks to a standardization of technology brought about by hard-
nosed business strategies on the part of the Edison company. Edison
contracted its rivals into a cartel which had to use Edison equipment
and pay royalties to the company. The cartel dominated the market
from 1909 to 1917 when an anti-trust law broke it up. Ironically, this
ratio was the one adopted by television for its own screens, even
though HDTV uses a ratio of 1.76:1. Edison went out of business,
but the aspect ratio for a standard screen remained the norm
internationally, until the early 1950s, when the threat posed to film
audiences by television obliged the film industry to find visual
ways to attract or retain audiences. Although there had been
experimentation with other screen sizes, it was not until economic
necessity forced the film industry to invest heavily in technology
that screens took on different dimensions. The first innovation in
size was cinemascope with a standard aspect ratio of 2.35:1.
Nowadays, films are more commonly projected either from the wide-
gauge 70 mm film frame with an aspect ratio of 2.2:1 or from 35 mm
film with its top and bottom pre-cropped with an aspect ratio of
1.85:1 in the United States and 1.66:1 in European cinemas.

asynchronization/asynchronous sound (see also sound, seamlessness,

space and time) Asynchronization occurs when the sound is either
intentionally or unintentionally out of sync with the image. In the
latter case this is the result of faulty editing (for example a spoken
voice out of sync with the moving lips). In the former, it has an
aesthetic and/or narrative function. First, asynchronization calls
attention to itself: thus the spectator is made aware that she or he

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 auteur/auteur theory

is watching a film (so the illusion of identification is temporarily

removed or deconstructed). Second, it serves to disrupt time and
space and thereby narrative continuity, and as such points to the
illusion of reality created by classic narrative cinema through its
seamless continuity editing. Finally, it can be used for humorous
effect, as occasionally in the earliest talkies when the advent of
sound was met by film-makers with mixed reactions. There were
two camps of thought: those who embraced the new technology
and those who feared it would transform cinema into filmed theatre.
As an example of this latter camp, the French film-maker René Clair
was concerned that sound would limit visual experimentation and
remove the poetic dimension inherent in silent film. His early sound
films (mostly comic operettas) play with sound. By confounding
the actual source of sound (for example, we see a woman singing
framed in a window, then there is a cut and we go into her room and
we realize that in fact she is miming to a record player), he draws
attention to its pretensions at the ‘reality effect’ (see his A nous la
liberté, 1931).

audience (for a fuller discussion see spectator) Always recognized as

important by film distributors and exhibitors, the audience has now
become an important area of research for film theorists and
sociologists (for references see spectatorship). Considerable work
has been done on reception theory (how the audience receives
and/or is positioned by the film). More recently, the debate has
focused on how the spectator both identifies with the film and
becomes an active producer of meaning as subject of the film (see
agency). The film industry has since its beginnings targeted films
to attract large audiences; this has meant that the product is
predominantly audience-led. As the audience changes (for example,
from working-class men and women before the Second World War
to women after the war, to youth from the late 1950s), so too does
the type of product.

auteur/auteur theory/politique des auteurs/Cahiers du cinéma

Although auteur is a term that dates back to the 1920s in the
theoretical writings of French film critics and directors of the silent
era, it is worth pointing out that in Germany, as early as 1913, the
term ‘author’s film’ (Autorenfilm) had already been coined. The

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auteur/auteur theory

Autorenfilm emerged partly as a response to the French Film d’Art

(art cinema) movement which began in 1908 and which proved
extremely popular. Film d’Art was particularly successful in
attracting middle-class audiences to the cinema theatres because
of its cachet of respectability as art cinema. The German term,
Autorenfilm, is, however, also associated with a more polemical
issue regarding questions of authorship. In this respect, some
writers for the screen started campaigning for their rights to these
so-called Autorenfilm. That is, they staked their claim not just to
the script but to the film itself. In other words, the film was to be
judged as the work of the author rather than the person responsible
for directing it (Eisner, 1969, 39). In France the concept of auteur (in
the 1920s) comes from the other direction, namely that the film-
maker is the auteur – irrrespective of the origin of the script. Often,
in fact, the author of the script and film-maker were one and the
same (but not always), for example, the film-maker Germaine Dulac
worked with the playwright Antonin Artaud to make La Coquille
et le clergyman (1927). During the 1920s, the debate in France
centred on the auteur versus the scenario-led film (that is, scenarios
commissioned by studios and production companies from
scriptwriters and subsequently directed by a studio-appointed
director). This distinction fed into the high-art/low-art debate already
set in motion as early as 1908 in relation to film (the so-called Film
d’Art versus popular cinema controversy). Thus, by the 1920s within
the domain of film theory, auteur-films had as much value if not
more than canonical literary adaptations which in turn had more
value than adaptations of popular fiction. After 1950, and in the
wake of Alexandre Astruc’s seminal essay ‘Naissance d’une nouvelle
avant-garde: la Caméra-stylo’ (L’Ecran français, 1948) this debate
was ‘picked up’ again and popularized – with the eventual effect,
as we shall see, of going some way towards dissolving the high-
art/low-art issue. The leader in this renewed auteur-debate was the
freshly launched film review Cahiers du cinéma (launched in 1951)
and the essay most famously identified with this debate is François
Truffaut’s 1954 essay ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma’. Although
it should not be seen as the sole text arguing for auteur cinema,
none the less, it is considered the manifesto for the French New
Wave.
In the 1950s, the Cahiers du cinéma (still in existence today)
was headed by André Bazin, a film critic, and was written by a
regular group of film critics, known as the Cahiers group. This

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 auteur/auteur theory

group did not pursue the 1920s theorists’ thinking (see avant-garde);
in fact, they either ignored or totally dismissed it. This later debate
is the one that has been carried forward into film theory. Through
the Cahiers discussions on the politique des auteurs (that is, the
polemical debate surrounding the concept of auteurism), the group
developed the notion of the auteur by binding it closely up with
the concept of mise-en-scène. This shift in the meaning of the
auteur was largely due to the avid attention the Cahiers group
paid to American/Hollywood cinema. During the German occupation
of France in the Second World War, American films had been
proscribed. Suddenly, after the war, hundreds of such films,
heretofore unseen, flooded the French cinema screens. This cinema,
directed by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawkes, John
Ford and Samuel Fuller, seemed refreshingly new and led the
Cahiers group to a reconsideration of Hollywood’s production.
They argued that just because American directors had little or no
say over any of the production process bar the staging of the
shots, this did not mean that they could not attain auteur status.
Style, as in mise-en-scène, could also demarcate an auteur. Thanks
to the Cahiers group, the term auteur could now refer either to a
director’s discernible style through mise-en-scène or to film-making
practices where the director’s signature was as much in evidence
on the script/scenario as it was on the film product itself. Exemplars
of auteurism in this second form (total author) are Jean Vigo, Jean
Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda in France, Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta in Germany,
Orson Welles and David Lynch in the United States. Certain film-
makers (mostly of the mise-en-scène form of auteur) have had this
label ascribed to them by the Cahiers group even though their
work may pre-date this use of the term (for example Hawkes, Ford,
Fuller and Hitchcock on the American scene).
The politique des auteurs was a polemic initiated by the
Cahiers group not just to bring favourite American film-makers
into the canon but also to attack the French cinema of the time
which they considered sclerotic, ossified. Dubbing it le cinéma de
papa, they accused it of being script-led, redolent with safe
psychology, lacking in social realism and of being produced by the
same old scriptwriters and film-makers whose time was up (François
Truffaut was by far the most virulent in his attacks). This quasi-
Oedipal polemic established the primacy of the author/auteur and
as such proposed a rather romantic and, therefore, conservative

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auteur/auteur theory

aesthetic. And, given the hot political climate in France during the
1950s, it is striking how apolitical and unpoliticized the group’s
writings were – pointing again to a conservative positioning. A
further problem with this polemic is that by privileging the auteur it
erases context (that is, history) and therefore side-steps ideology.
Equally, because film is being looked at for its formalistic, stylistic
and thematic structures, unconscious structure (such as the
unspoken dynamics between film-maker and actor, the economic
pressures connected with the industry) is precluded. Interestingly,
of two of the writers in the Cahiers group who went on to make
films, Godard and Truffaut, it is Truffaut’s work that is locked in the
conservative romantic ideology of the politique des auteurs and
Godard’s which has constantly questioned auteurism (among other
things).
This politique generated a debate that lasted well into the 1980s,
and auteur is a term which still prevails today. Given its innate
conservatism one might well ask why. The first answer is that it
helped to shift the notion of film theory, which until the 1950s had
been based primarily in sociological analysis. The second answer
is that the debate made clear that attempts to provide a single film
theory just would not work and that, in fact, film is about multiple
theories.
What follows is a brief outline of the development of auteur
theory through three phases (for more detail see Andrew, 1984;
Caughie, 1981; Cook, 1985; Lapsley and Westlake, 1988). The figure
outlined opposite gives a graphic representation of auteurism.
The term ‘auteur theory’ came about in the 1960s as a
mistranslation by the American film critic Andrew Sarris. What had
been a ‘mere’ polemic now became a full-blown theory. Sarris used
auteurism to nationalistic and chauvinistic ends to elevate
American/Hollywood cinema to the status of the ‘only good
cinema’, with but one or two European art films worthy of mention.
As a result of this misuse of the term, cinema became divided into
a canon of the ‘good’ or ‘great’ directors and the rest. The initial
impact of this on film courses and film studies in general was
considerable, the tendency being to study only the good or great
canon. Thankfully the impact of cultural studies on film studies in
the late 1970s has served to redress this imbalance as well as
developments in film theory.
The debate did not end there. It was picked up in the late 1960s
in the light of the impact of structuralism. In France, the Cahiers

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 auteur/auteur theory

du cinéma was obliged to rethink and readjust its thinking around

auteurism, and in Britain the film journal Movie significantly
developed the debate. As a concept, structuralism dates back to
the beginning of the twentieth century primarily in the form of
Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theories. However, it remained
little known until the theories were brought into the limelight by
the French philosopher-semiotician Roland Barthes in the 1950s –
especially in his popularizing essays Mythologies (1957). Saussure,
in his Cours de linguistique générale, sets out the base paradigm
by which all language can be ordered and understood. The base
paradigm langue/parole was intended as a function that could
simultaneously address and speak for the profound universal
structures of language or language system (langue) and their
manifestations in different cultures (parole). Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
anthropological structuralism of the 1960s (which looked at
American Indian myths) continued in a similar vein, although this
time it was applied to narrative structures. Lévi-Strauss’s thesis
was that since all cultures are the products of the human brain
there must be, somewhere, beneath the surface, features that are
common to all.
Structuralism was an approach that became extremely popular
in France during the 1960s. Following the trend set by Barthes and
Lévi-Strauss, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser adapted it

23
auteur/auteur theory

into his discussions on ideology and Jacques Lacan into his writings
on psychoanalysis. The fundamental point to be made about this
popularization of structuralism in France is socio-political and refers
to structuralism’s strategy of total theory. This popularization of
structuralism coincided with Charles de Gaulle’s return to
presidential power in 1958. His calls for national unity (in the face
of the Algerian crisis), the era of economic triumphalism and the
consequent nationalism that prevailed were in themselves
symptomatic of a desire for structures to be mobilized to give France
a sense of national identity. Thus, the desire for total structure, as
exemplified by structuralism, can be read as an endeavour to counter
the real political instability of the 1960s.
It is also worth labouring the point that this ‘rethinking’ of film
theory in the 1960s did not come via film criticism (as it did in the
1950s) but through other disciplines, namely structural linguistics
and semiotics. This pattern would repeat itself in the 1970s with
psychoanalysis and philosophy pushing the debate along, and
then history in the 1980s. The significance of this new trend of
essayists and philosophers turning to cinema to apply their theories
cannot be underestimated. Not to put too simplistic a reading on
their importance, it is unquestionably their work which has
legitimated film studies as a discipline and brought cinema firmly
into the academic arena.
Structuralism was eagerly seized upon by proponents of
auteurism because it was believed that, with its scientific approach,
it would facilitate the establishing of an objective basis for the
concept and counter the romantic subjectivity of auteur theory.
Furthermore, apart from its potential to give a scientific legitimacy
to auteurism, the attraction of structuralism for film theory in general
lay in the theory’s underlying strategy to establish a total structure.
Symptomatic of this desire for order in film theory were Christian
Metz’s endeavours (in the mid-1960s) to situate cinema within a
Saussurian semiology. Metz, a semiotician, was the first to set out,
in his Essais sur la signification au cinéma (1971, 1972), a total
theory approach in the form of his grande syntagmatique. He
believed that cinema possessed a total structure. To adopt
Saussurian terms, he perceived cinema as langue and each film as
being parole. His endeavour – to uncover the rules that governed
film language and to establish a framework for a semiotics of the
cinema – pointed to a fundamental limitation with such an all-
embracing, total approach: that of the theory overtaking the text

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 auteur/auteur theory

and occluding other aspects of the text. What gets omitted is the
notion of pleasure and audience reception, and what occurs instead
is a crushing of the aesthetic experience through the weight of the
theoretical framework.
This is not to say that structuralism did not advance the debate
on film theory and auteurism. It did. Auteur-structuralism brought
about a major positive change to auteur theory (à la Sarris). The
British film journal Movie pointed out the problems of a resolutely
romantic aesthetic in relation to cinema, but saw ways to deal with
them. By situating the auteur as one structure among others –
such as the notion of genre and the film industry – producing
meaning, the theory would yield to a greater flexibility. Cahiers du
cinéma was also critical of the romantic notion of auteurship
because the auteur is not a unified and free creative spirit and film
as a text is a ‘play of tensions, silences and repressions’ (Caughie,
1981, 128). Thus the auteur was displaced from the centre of the
work and was now one structure among several others making up
the film text. This displacement allowed other structures to emerge,
namely, the linguistic, social and institutional structures and the
auteur’s relationship to them. And even though in the late 1960s
the tendency was still to perceive the auteur structure as the major
one, it was also recognized that the studio and stars – amongst
others – were equally important contributors to the production of
meaning in film. Still absent from the debate, however, was the
spectator – the question of pleasure and ideology.
After 1968 Cahiers made a first attempt to introduce ideology
into the debate in its exploration of Hollywood films that either
‘resisted’ or reflected dominant ideology. (In what is referred to as
‘the Young Mr Lincoln debate’, the Cahiers group claimed that
this film mediated Republican values to counter Roosevelt’s
Democratic New Deal measures of 1933–41 and to promote a
Republican victory in the 1940 Presidential elections.) Althusser’s
discussions on ideology, particularly his concept of interpellation,
made it possible for both Cahiers and the British journal Screen to
start to address the screen–spectator relationship. At this juncture,
both journals accepted what, with hindsight, turned out to be a
profoundly anti-humanist analysis of spectator positioning.
According to Althusser, ideological state apparatuses (ISAs)
interpellate individuals as subjects: that is, as pre-existing structures,
ISAs function to constitute the individual as a subject to the
ideology. ISAs manifest themselves as institutions of the state: the

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auteur/auteur theory

police, government, monarchies are ISAs. Just to illustrate: the

British are subjects to the monarchy. The individual is, therefore,
an effect of ISAs and not an agent. As subject-effects, individuals
give meaning to ideology by colluding with and acting according
to it. A mirroring process occurs which provides the subject with a
reassuring sense of national identity (of belonging). Applied to
film this means that cinema, in terms of meaning production,
positions the spectator as a subject-effect who takes as real the
images emanating from the screen. Thus, meaning is received, but
not constructed, by the subject.
It would take the impact of post-structuralism (see
structuralism), psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstruction to
make clear finally that a single theory was inadequate and that
what was required was a pluralism of theories that cross-fertilized
each other. Post-structuralism, which does not find an easy
definition, could be said to regroup and, to some extent, cross-
fertilize the three other theoretical approaches (psychoanalysis,
feminism and deconstruction). As its name implies, it was born out
of a profound mistrust for total theory, and started from the position
that all texts are a double articulation of discourses and non-
discourses (that is, the said and the non-said, le dit et le non-dit).
In terms of auteur theory the effect was multiple: ‘the intervention
of semiotics and psychoanalysis’ ‘shattering’ once and for all ‘the
unity of the auteur’ (Caughie, 1981, 200). Because post-structuralism
looks at all relevant discourses (said or unsaid) revolving around
and within the text, many more areas of meaning-production can be
identified. Thus, semiotics introduced the theory of the textual
subject: that is, subject positions within the textual process,
including that of the spectator and the auteur, all producing
meanings. Furthermore, semiotics also made clear that the text is a
series of signs producing meanings.
Having defined the auteur’s place within the textual process,
auteur theory could now be placed within a theory of textuality.
Since there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ text, the intertextuality
(effects of different texts upon another text) of any film text must be
a major consideration, including auteurial intertextuality. That is,
the auteur is a figure constructed out of her or his film: because of
x hallmarks the film is ostensibly a certain film-maker’s and also
influenced by that of others, etc. Psychoanalysis introduced the
theory of the sexual, specular, divided subject (divided by the fact
of difference, loss of and separation from the mother (see

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 avant - garde

psychoanalysis)). Questions of the subject come into play: who is

the subject (the text, auteur, spectator)? What are the effects of the
enunciating text (i.e. the film as performance) on the spectator and
those on the filmic text of the spectator? What are the two-way
ideological effects (film on spectator and vice versa) and the
pleasures derived by the spectator as she or he moves in and out
of the text (see spectator-identification)? To speak of text means
too that the context must also come into play in terms of meaning
production: modes of production, the social, political and historical
context. Finally and simultaneously, one cannot speak of a text as
transparent, natural or innocent: therefore it is to be unpicked,
deconstructed so that its modes of representation are fully
understood.

avant-garde It is perhaps curious that a military term should come to

define what is now usually an anti-establishment positioning. The
term avant-garde was first used in the modern sense to typify
various aesthetic groupings immediately before and after the First
World War, from about the dates given: cubism and futurism (both
1909), dadaism (1916), Constructivism (1920) and surrealism (1924).
It is also curious to note that, in part, it was in reaction to the
horrors of that war that the later avant-garde movements came
about. The avant-garde seeks to break with tradition and is
intentionally politicized in its attempts to do so. In cinema the avant-
garde cachet was first used in the 1920s when a group of French
film theorists (most famously Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac and
Jean Epstein) turned their hand to film-making and sought to create
a cinema of the avant-garde. The first point to be made about this
loosely banded collective is the pluralism of its members’ theoretical
approaches to cinema, which clearly inflected their film-making
practices. Between them, they addressed issues of high and popular
art, realist versus naturalist film, the spectator–screen relationship,
editing styles (particularly that of the Soviet school and montage),
simultaneity, subjectivity, the unconscious, and the
psychoanalytical potential of film, auteur cinema, cinema as rhythm
and as a sign (see semiology). Once they turned their hands to
making film, experimentation was central to their practice. This
experimentation functioned on three overlapping levels: reworking
genres, exploring the possibilities of film language and redefining
the representation of subjectivity. Genres were mixed, intercalated

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avant - garde

and juxtaposed. Similarly the popular was fused with the

experimental (mainstream cinema with counter-cinema), socio-
realism with the subjective (documentary with melodrama). Working
within these popular genres allowed them to extend, distort, even
subvert dominant discourses. In so doing, these avant-garde film-
makers attacked the precept of filmic narrative and spectator
omniscience. Their films raised questions about subjectivity and
its representation by disrupting diegetic time and space. This was
achieved in a number of ways: shifts from diegetic continuity to
discontinuity, fast editing, disruption of conventional transitional
shots, disorientating shots through unmatched shots or a
simultaneous representation of a multiplicity of perspectives. Thus,
the fetishizing gaze of the male was also examined, showing an
awareness of the underprivileging of female subjectivity.
Subjectivity not only became a question of point of view but also
included the implicit notion of voyeurism and speculation (of the
female other – see gaze) as well as the issue of desire, and the
functioning of the conscious and the unconscious mind (see Abel,
1984, 241–95; Flitterman-Lewis, 1990; Hayward, 1993, 76–80 and
106–11).
Soviet cinema and German expressionism with, respectively,
their characteristic editing and lighting practices greatly influenced
this first avant-garde, as did the surrealist movement and
psychoanalysis. This avant-garde went through three different
stages: subjective cinema (showing the interior life of a character,
as in La Souriante Mme Beudet, Dulac, 1923), pure cinema (film
signifying in and of itself through its plasticity and rhythms, as in
Entr’acte, René Clair, 1924) and surrealist cinema (a collision of the
first two stages with the intention of giving filmic representation to
the rationality and irrationality of the unconscious and dream state,
as in La Coquille et le clergyman, Dulac, 1927 and Un chien
andalou, Luis Buñuel, 1929).
Since that period, other influences have also come into play.
And, interestingly, once again there are three dominant types: first,
what Wollen (1982, 92) calls the self-reflexive avant-garde
(predominantly American), or what Andrew (1984, 124) terms the
American romantic; second, the avowedly political avant-garde
(Wollen, 1982, 92) or the European structural materialist film (Andrew,
1984, 125); finally, the narrative avant-garde of the cinema of écriture
(Andrew, 1984, 126).

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