Title of the Module:

Auteur Theory

Theoretical conceptualization of auteur, in the context of cinema, has its fountainhead in the
highly prestigious French film journal, Cahiers du Cinema (Notebooks on Cinema) which had
started its publication from Paris, the capital city of France in 1951. Cahiers du Cinema was
cofounded by following three French cinema critics: Andre Bazin, Marie Lo Duca and Doniol
Valcroze. Prior to the launch of Cahiers du Cinema, these film critics were associated with
another film magazine, Revue du Cinema (Review of Cinema) which had been in publication
since 1928 to 1948. Cahiers du Cinema, which is still being published, is considered to be the
intellectual space out of which Auteurism or Auteur Theory originated and further developed.

Learning Objectives
To enable the learner to:
1) understand the concept of auteur in Film Studies
2) grasp the essential characteristics of Auteurship
3) familiarize with a few auteurs and their films
4) follow a few theoretical models of auteur theory

The lexeme ‘auteur’ is considered to be the French linguistic equivalence of the English lexeme
‘author’. Traditionally, literary authors have been credited with a creative and intellectual aura
around them. However, till the emergence of auteur theory, or Auteurism in mid-1950s, film
directors were not credited at par with literary authors. It was with the French New Wave films
that Auteurism got established as a practice in French cinema. French filmmaker, Claude
Chabrol’s La Beau Serge (Handsome Serge), which was released in 1958, could be considered
as one of the first auteur films in the French New Wave movement. Auteur theory proposes
that a film director has to be acknowledged as the most important creative factor behind the
execution of a movie. Auteur directors invariably leave a signature style in their movies. It is
believed that the fundamental touchstones of Auteurship were offered by the French film
theoreticians like Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc. Andre Bazin always believed that a film
is basically the conception of its director. Proposing the idea of camera-stylo or camera-pen,
Alexandre Astruc provided further explication to auteur theory. Just like a literary author uses
the pen to achieve the uniqueness of his writings, a film director imagines a unique mise-en-
scene to create a distinct visual language. An auteur is the primary agent who uniquely
assembles various departments of film production so as to bring all of them together into the
making of a particular cinematic craft. With his camera-pen the auteur writes the cinema text
by combining the various visual, aural, textual and editing elements in a film. Later on, Jean-
Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut became the forerunners of the Auteur Theory.

Andrew George Sarris, the American film critic, “coined the term ‘auteur theory’ to describe
the contention that the director is the vital creative force of a movie” (Britannica). It was in his
essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory”, published in 1962, that Andrew Sarris coined the term
‘auteur theory’.

The theory of the auteur still eludes a precise definition, as most of the theoretical
conceptualizations on films do. Andrew Sarris acknowledges that it was the theoretical writings
on cinema which appeared in the Cahiers do Cinema that laid the foundations of auteur theory.
Sarris, at the beginning of his essay makes it clear that auteur theory does not attribute a gift of
prophecy and any extracinematic caliber to cinema directors. It also has to be noted that auteurs
need not exhibit a cent percent stylistic consistency always. Sarris says that, “The badness of a
director is not necessarily considered the badness of a film” (562). There can be many films
with high entertainment values, which even do not thrive on the single intellectual capacity of
its directors. Film like the Cherry Orchard, and One-Eyed Jack cannot be called director’s
films. These films make their impact not primarily with their directors’ ability, but with other
factors like celebrity actors, theme, cinematography, editing and so on.

Andrews Sarris also observes that all films could not be brought under the critical lens of auteur
theory. He says, “Obviously, the auteur theory cannot possibly cover every vagrant charm of
cinema” (562) Films like The Longest Day cannot be considered under Auteurism, according
to Andrew Sarris.

Sarris proposed the following three theoretical premises of the Auteur Theory.

1. Technical Competency of Auteur

According to Andrew Sarris, “the first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence
of a director as a criterion of value” (562). If the director does not a have the basic technical
competency, he will automatically be out of the auteur pantheon. Even though the directorial
talent is very abstract in nature, an auteur director exhibits an allrounder’s grip over the various
aspects of film conception, filmmaking, film technology etc. Firstly, an auteur director has to
be a good director. To take an example from India, Satyajit Ray is considered to be an essential
auteur. Ray’s Charulata proclaims beyond doubt the auteur status of Ray. His talent in all areas
of filmmaking, scripting, direction, music, editing etc. turned him into an auteur.

2. Signature Style of Auteur

Auteurship is primarily detected through a few consistent signature stylistic traits found across
the cinematic oeuvre of a particular director. “The second premise of the auteur theory is the
distinguishable person personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films,
a director must exhibit recurrent characteristic of style, which serve as his signature. The way
a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director think and feels”
(Sarris, 562). Sarris explains this with special reference to Hollywood movies as he believes
that American directors are forced to express their filmic personality through the particular
visual handling of cinematic materials, rather than through the literary merit of the content. It
is the auteurship talent that provides the signature visual idiom of a film. Films of Douglas Sirk
and Otto Preminger are cited to establish their Auteurism. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is one
of the films which is often cited as an example of cinema as a work of art that reveals the
significant style of its author, i.e., the director. An auteur is supposed to be a “metteur en scene”
or a scene setter. The consistency and uniqueness of the auteur scenography would be visible
across the body of his cinema.

3. The Auteurist Soul or Interior Meaning

More than what is materially manifested in the body of the film and its aesthetic
distinguishability, the presence of an auteur in a film is experienced by the spectator in a rather
abstract way. Auteur cinema has a larger semantic and aesthetic interiority attached with it.
The tension between the film director and the cinematic materials at his disposal produces the
soul of cinema. In Sarris’ words, “The third ultimate premise of auteur theory is concerned
with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated
from the tension between a director’s personality and his material. The conception of interior
meaning comes close to that Astruc defines as mise-en-scene, but not quite. It is not quite the
vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life. It is ambiguous in any
literary sense, because of part of it is imbedded in the stuff of the temperature of the director
on the set, and that is close approximation of its professional aspect” (562-563). Sarris further
clarifies that by the ‘soul’ of an auteur he means “that intangible difference between one
personality and another, all other things being equal. Sometimes the difference is expressed by
no more than a beat’s hesitation in the rhythm of a film” (563). Andrew Sarris, suggests the
following sequence in Jean Renoir’s film La Regle du Jeu (The Rule of the Game, 1939)

Graphical Visualization of Auteur Theory

Andrew Sarris, presents a graphic model to comprehend the idea of auteur more clearly. “Three
premises of the auteur theory may be visualized as three concentric circles: the outer circle as
technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning. The
corresponding role of the director may be designated as those of a technician, a stylist, and an
auteur.” However, there is no path that a director could be graduated to the status of an auteur.
Some filmmakers evolve from metteur en scene to an auteur; others can move from auteur to
metteur en scene.

Auteur theory, as an intellectual enterprise to highlight the role of the director as the most
significant single element in moviemaking, has developed through various theoretical
formulations. It was not developed by a single theoretical school or with a fixed manifesto; but
with different types of critical contributions from different intellectual quarters. Peter Wollen
says that, “The auteur theory does not limit itself to acclaiming the director as the main author
of a film. It implies an operation of decipherment; it reveals authors where not had seen before”
(563). This statement means that with the notion of auteurship, many filmmakers who had been
pushed to anonymity were brought into the attention of film scholars and cinephiles. “In fact,
the auteur theory itself is a pattern theory in constant flux (563)”, according to Sarris.

Peter Wollen mentions two major schools of auteur critics: The Semantic School, and the
Formalist School. The Semantic School of auteur scholarship concentrated on the exploration
of the meanings and motifs in a films. On the contrary, The Formalist School of auteur
scholarship concentrated on the exploration of the signature stylistic features of auteur cinema
revealed primarily through the films mise-en-scene.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith offers a ‘structural approach’ by explicating auteur theory further. This
approach predicates two levels of structures in an auteur cinema: one the external apparent
characteristics, and the second, the hidden internal characteristics. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s
structural approach to auteur theory resembles Saussurean linguistic binary of the externally
manifested parole and the internally structured langue. Nowell-Smith elaborates the structural
approach further in the following words. “One essential corollary of the theory as it has been
developed is the discovery that the defining characteristics of an author’s work are not
necessarily those which are most readily apparent. Th purpose of criticism thus becomes to
uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subjects and treatment a hard core of basic and often
recondite motifs. The pattern formed by these motifs … is what gives an author’s work its
particular structure, both defining it internally and distinguishing one body of work from
another” (qtd. in Wollen, 18).

The films of American auteur Howard Hawks, though externally look different as per generic
classification, exhibit a consistency in thematic motifs, according to Peter Wollen. In spite of
each film’s external differences, almost all the films of Hawks “exhibit the same thematic
preoccupations, the same recurring motifs and incidents, the same visual style and tempo. In
the same way Roland Barthes constructed a species of homo racinianus, the critic can construct
a homo howksianus, the protagonist of Hawksian values in the problematic Hawksian world.
Hawks achieved this by reducing the genres into two basic types: the adventure drama and the
crazy comedy. These two types express inverse views of the world, the positive and negative
poles of Hawksian vision” (Wollen, 81).

John Ford, the American film director, is another example of an auteur filmmaker, in whose
films the recurrent theme of death and heroism could be detected as the internally consistent
elements. Peter Wollen fixes the auteurship of John Ford in the following fashion. “All these
directors [including John Ford] are concerned with the problem of heroism. For the hero, as an
individual, death is an absolute limit which cannot be transcended: it renders the life which
preceded it meaningless, absurd. How then can there be any meaningful individual action
during life? How can individual action have any value? —be heroic—if it cannot have
transcendent value because of the absolutely devaluing limit death? John Ford finds answer to
this question by placing and situating the individual within society and within history,
specifically within American history. Ford finds transcendent values in the historic vocation of
America as a nation, to bring civilization to a savage land, the garden to the wilderness” (81).

Establishing auteurship is a critical practice, not a subjective initiations of filmmakers;

auteurship is attributed from outside, not claimed by the film directors. There are three
important scholastic considerations behind the formulation of the idea of the auteur. Separate
analysis of individual films by a filmmaker, understanding of paradigm shifts across the
filmography of a filmmaker and, a critical comprehension of the underlying homogeneity
distributed throughout her filmography. Therefore, ascribing auteurship is a complex process
of the comprehension of the totality of a filmmaker’s politics, aesthetics, idiom and finally his
philosophy of life. Peter Wollen mentions that, once Jean Renoir famously commented that a
director spends his whole life making one film. Wollen lays out the practical method of proving
auteurship in the following words: “Of course, the director does not have full control over his
work; this explains why the auteur theory involves a kind of decipherment, decryptment. A
great many features of films analysed have to be dismissed as indecipherable because of ‘noise’
from the producer, the cameraman or even the actors. …. What the auteur theory does is to take
a group of film—the work of one director—and analyse their structure. Everything irrelevant
to this, everything non-pertinent is considered logically secondary, contingent, to be discarded,
…. It is as though a film is a musical composition rather than a musical performance, although
whereas a musical composition exists a priori (like a scenario), an auteur film is constructed a
posteriori” (104-105).

In the context of filmic adaptation of literary work, how does the theory of auteur operate?
When literary masterpieces are adapted into films, whose authorship will prevail in the film?
The literary author’s or the filmic authors? Auteur theory essentially acknowledges only the
filmic author’s contribution. “What the auteur theory demonstrates is that the director is not
simply in command of a performance of a pre-existing text; he is not, or need not be, only a
metteur en scene.” For an auteur, a literary work is only a trigger that ignites his cinematic
imagination. Wollen elaborates on the minor connection between a literary work and a
cinematic adaptation of it by an auteur. “Incidents and episodes in the original screenplay or
novel can act as catalysts [as Don Siegel opined]; they are agents introduced in the mind
(conscious or unconscious) of the auteur and reacts there with the motifs and themes
characteristics of his work. The director does not subordinate himself to another author; his
source is only a pretext, which provides catalysts, scenes which fuse with his own
preoccupations to produce a radically new work. Thus the manifest process of performance,
the treatment of a subject, conceals the latent production of a quite new text, the production of
the director as an auteur.” In fact, the literary author dies in cinematic adaptation in the hands
of the filmic auteur.

References:

Caughie, John, ed. Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

Nelmes, Jill. An Introduction to Film Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory”. Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Baudry
and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp 561-564.

Wollen, Peter. “Auteur Theory”. Signs and Meanings in Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1972. Pp 76-115.

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