New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

194 CINEMATIC REALISM
CINEMATIC ECRITURE
One term very much in circulation in the entire post-war period is
ECRITURE, or writing. Indeed, one might easily chart the major
developments in post-war intellectual history, at least in France, by the
successive inflections given to this term. Already in Le Degré Zero de la
Littérature (Writing Degree Zero, 1953; trans. 1968), Barthes distinguished
between LANGUE/ STYLE and écriture, where langue represents the
“horizon” of the very possibility of writing, style is the mark of
individuality, and écriture represents the process of expressive negotiation
between the social generality of language and style as a kind of personal
repertory of devices. In 1960, Barthes distinguished between ECRIVANTS
(writers), i.e. those for whom writing is transitive, a means to an end, and
ECRIVAINS (authors), i.e. those for whom writing is a self-purposeful
activity, an end in itself. But alongside the literary and philosophical
discussion of écriture, film discourse too became oriented toward the
constellation of concepts revolving around “writing” and “textuality.” The
GRAPHOLOGICAL TROPE, i.e. the metaphor which compares filmmaking
to a kind of writing, has dominated film theory and criticism,
especially in France, since the 1950s, from Astruc’s “caméra-stylo”
(camera-pen) to Metz’ discussion of “cinema and écriture” in Language
and Cinema. The French New Wave directors were especially fond of the
scriptural metaphor, scarcely surprising given that many of them began as
writer-critics who saw writing articles and making films as alternative forms
of expressive écriture. Indeed, the New Wave itself formed part of a
discursive continuum of experimentation which included the nouveau
roman, absurdist theater and other experiments in music and the arts. The
writing metaphor, in any case, facilitated a displacement of interest from
realism to textuality, from the situation or characters depicted to the act of
writing itself.
AUTEURISM was defined by André Bazin in “La Politique des Auteurs”
(1957) as the analytical process of “choosing in the artistic creation the
personal factor as a criterion of reference, and then postulating its
permanence and even its progress from one work to the next.” 2 Auteurism
was fueled by successive waves of European “art cinema” and by
independent 16mm production. The auteurists extended the notion of
individual authorship, obvious in the case of such clearly artistic directors
as Eisenstein or Cocteau, to mainstream studio directors such as Hitchcock
and Hawks. While auteurism in one sense resuscitated a romanticism
discarded both by the other arts and by the most advanced theory, its
project of seeking out and constructing authorial personalities did at least
introduce a kind of system, however problematic, into the realm of film
studies. This systematic side of auteurism made it apparently reconcilable
with a hybrid called AUTEUR-STRUCTURALISM, exemplified by such