Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
However, although French cinema and American cinema
were very different in some respects, in others they were
not. The more personal and individual French cinema
that Truffaut and the others admired—Jean Renoir
(1894–1979), Robert Bresson (1901–1999), Jacques
Tati (1909–1982), Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), Max
Ophuls (1902–1957), Jacques Becker (1906–1960)—
drew its strength and individuality from an essentially
nonliterary originality and audacity of realization, or
mise-en-sce `ne—qualities that they also admired in
American cinema. This French cinema they contrasted
to the tired cine ´ma de papa (daddy’s cinema)—the unadventurous literary cinema of Jean Delannoy (b. 1908) or
Claude Autant-Lara (1901–2000), or the academic technical competence of directors like Rene´ Cle´ment (1913–
1996) and Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977), who,
they claimed, merely put solid, worthy scripts into
sounds and images.
As this implies, one of the crucial effects of this
identification of auteurs was to shift to the center of film
analysis the notion of mise-en-sce `ne as the means through
which the auteur expressed his (or her—but American or
European, the figures discussed were all male) personality
and individuality. Writing in Cahiers in August 1960,
Fereydoun Hoveyda argued that: the originality of the auteur lies not in the subject
matter he chooses, but in the technique he
employs, i.e., the mise-en-sce `ne, through which
everything on the screen is expressed. . . . As
Sartre said: ‘‘One isn’t a writer for having chosen
to say certain things, but for having chosen to
say them in a certain way.’’ Why should it be
any different for cinema? . . . The thought of a
cineaste appears through his mise-en-sce `ne (Hillier,
1986, p. 142).
Although the Hollywood director might have little control over choice of subject and cast, or over the script, it
was on the set, attentive to de´cor, performance, and
camera positioning and movement—controlling what
would appear on the screen—that the director expressed
his individuality. Of course, many of the directors that
the Cahiers critics championed as auteurs—Hitchcock
and Hawks, certainly—were often their own producers
and chose their projects and worked on their scripts,
officially or not, and so had more control than the
general model implied. Additionally, in the postDivorcement Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s, the
growth of independent production meant that many
other directors began to have more say in their projects.
Given the essential emphasis on mise-en-sce `ne, it is
somewhat confusing that Cahiers critics distinguished
between those directors whom they regarded as auteurs
and those they regarded as (mere) metteurs en sce `ne, directors
whose work lacked the individual personal expression of
the auteur but who could be competent and even skilled
interpreters of others’ ideas. Cle´ment and Clouzot might
have been classified thus; regarding American cinema,
arguments raged around particular directors—Vincente
Minnelli (1903–1986), for example—as to whether they
were auteurs or metteurs en sce `ne.
What appeared in Cahiers was not any kind of concerted ‘‘theory’’; furthermore, there were disagreements
in Cahiers itself. Chief among those who did not subscribe to the ‘‘excesses’’ of the politique des auteurs was
the journal’s chief editor (until his death in 1958) and
best-known writer, Andre´ Bazin. Bazin shared his colleagues’ enthusiasm for taking American cinema seriously, but at the same time he argued in the April 1952
issue of Cahiers that in the cinema more than in the other
arts, and in American cinema more than in other cinemas, industrial, commercial, and generic factors came
into play and meant that ‘‘the personal factor in artistic
creation as a standard of reference’’ needed to be seen in
context (Bazin in Graham, 1968, pp. 137–156). It is also
not quite right to credit Cahiers exclusively with thinking
about authorship in popular cinema. In Britain during
the late 1940s and the 1950s, the young critics who
produced Sequence magazine and later worked on Sight
and Sound—preeminently Lindsay Anderson and Gavin
Lambert—identified the popular cinema of John Ford
and Nicholas Ray, for example, as distinctive and personal. Strikingly, Anderson argued the case for John
Ford’s authorship in terms of his westerns rather than
his more ‘‘worthy’’ prestige productions, while Ray
became seen—by Cahiers and later by the British film
publication Movie—as one of the supreme examples of
the post–Orson Welles generation of Hollywood directors, consciously striving to make more personal films
and often in conflict with the system.
Ordinarily, such polemics and debates in a French
film magazine barely read outside of France would not
have caused many ripples in American and British film
criticism. However, by 1959 many of the Cahiers critics
involved in those polemics had gained acclaim as new
filmmakers. This was particularly true of two of the most
controversial Cahiers critics, Truffaut, whose first feature,
Les quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), triumphed at
the 1959 Cannes festival, and Godard, whose first feature, A` bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), also premiered
in 1959. Chabrol had already had success with Le Beau
Serge (Handsome Serge, 1958) and Les cousins (The
Cousins, 1959). The international success of these nouvelle vague films drew attention to their directors’ critical pasts, helping ideas about authorship, and new ways of
thinking about popular cinema, become matters of
debate in Britain and the United States at more or less
the same moment.