Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Auteur Theory and Authorship
Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino in On Dangerous Ground (1952) by cult auteur Nicholas Ray. EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
subscribe to the ‘‘excesses’’ of the politique des auteurs was
the journal’s chief editor (until his death in 1958) and
best-known writer, André 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,
À 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
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