Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
In terms of international recognition—industrially and
critically as well as in terms of audiences—European
cinema was seen rather differently than US cinema. If
US cinema was produced in factorylike conditions for
mass consumption and entertainment, European cinema
was seen much more in relation to, and as the equal of,
the other arts. But it is also the case that European critics
(and probably audiences as well, though this is less
clear) considered the cinema in general—including US
cinema—much more as an art form on a par with the
other arts than US—and British—critics and audiences
(and this was also true of other aspects of popular culture). In the postwar period, especially in France, the
cultivation of cinema as an art form was sustained in part
by a network of art cinemas and cine clubs (and in Paris by the Cine´mathe`que Franc¸aise), though directors like
Howard Hawks (1896–1977), King Vidor (1894–1982),
and Frank Borzage (1893–1962) had been identified as
distinctive as far back as the 1920s.
Postwar France was thus fertile ground for critics
trying to develop new ways of thinking about cinema,
particularly American cinema. From 1944 and 1945,
Hollywood films that had not been allowed in France
during the German occupation arrived in a flood and
prompted insightful ways of thinking about cinema,
especially American cinema. Examples are Andre´
Bazin’s ideas about realism, responding to Welles’s and
William Wyler’s (1902–1981) films with cinematographer Gregg Toland (1904–1948), and the identification of new strains in the crime thriller as film noir. The
‘‘egocentric conception of the director’’ embodied by
Welles was important: Franc¸ois Truffaut (1932–1984)
later used as an epigraph to his collection of critical
writings, The Films in My Life, Welles’s dictum, ‘‘I
believe a work is good to the degree that it expresses
the man who created it.’’ This was the atmosphere in
which the young novelist and director Alexandre Astruc
wrote in 1948 the polemic ‘‘The Birth of a New AvantGarde: La Came´ra-Stylo [Camera-Pen]’’ (Astruc in
Graham, 1968, pp. 17–23). Although Astruc’s precise
meaning is not always clear, a central idea was that
cinema was becoming a medium of personal expression
like the other arts: ‘‘In this kind of filmmaking the
distinction between author and director loses all meaning,’’ he stated. ‘‘Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing.
The filmmaker-author writes with his camera as a writer
writes with his pen’’ (Astruc in Graham, 1968, p. 22).
Contentions like Astruc’s that filmmaking was as
much an expressive art form as painting and the
novel—art forms where the essentially Romantic idea of
the individual artist before the page or canvas was easiest
to sustain—and that the filmmaker arrives at selfexpression through the process of direction, helped nurture the development of the politique des auteurs—the
auteur policy or polemic—in the pages of Cahiers du
Cine ´ma in the 1950s. Some confusion tends to arise from
the fact that the auteurism associated with critics like
Truffaut, Rivette, Eric Rohmer (b. 1920), Jean-Luc
Godard (b. 1930), and Claude Chabrol (b. 1930) is
usually linked with their enthusiasm and reverence for
Hollywood directors like Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock
(1899–1980), Ford, Nicholas Ray (1911–1979),
Anthony Mann (1906–1967), and Samuel Fuller
(1912–1997), whom they identified as auteurs, while
the essay often credited as setting the scene for the
politique was Truffaut’s critique of contemporary
French cinema (in his essay, ‘‘Une Certaine Tendance
du Cine´ma Franc¸ais’’ (A certain tendency of the French
cinema), in the January 1954 issue of Cahiers. As spectator-critics, the Cahiers writers enjoyed and admired
American popular cinema, but as future French filmmakers-critics in the French nouvelle vague (new wave),
they would inevitably make French films, not American
Hollywood ones; thus, their major concerns included
French cinema (along with, for example, Italian cinema,
which offered conditions and possibilities much more
akin to their own than did US cinema).