Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Bazin (its leading contributor), François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol,
Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette – and became one of the focal points of the French
New Wave movement.
These critics noticed thematic and stylistic consistencies among the films of individual
directors and elevated personal signature to a standard of value. They championed the
director as the auteur - the creator of a personal vision of the world that progresses from
film to film, and distinguished between directors who were auteurs and those who were
merely metteurs-en-scène (directors who merely realised the material they had been
given rather than transforming it into something of their own). Buscombe attributes
“this zeal to divide directors into the company of the elect on the right and a company of
the damned on the left” to the possible influence of French Catholicism, and identifies
“the presence of Romantic artistic theory in the opposition of intuition and rules,
sensibility and theory”. 40
The Cahiers critics’ limited knowledge of English made them uniquely equipped to
appreciate individual cinematic style in that the American films they watched at the
Cinémathèque movie theatre in Paris (films which had been unavailable during the
Second World War) often had no subtitles, thereby inviting a closer look at how
meaning is expressed through visual texture, composition, camera movement and
editing. They argued that, “artistry was revealed not only in what was said, but how it
was said and believed that, like any creator, the filmmaker ought to be a master of the
medium, exploring it in striking and innovative ways”. 41 Their respect for directors
such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, known for their prolific production of
commercial genre films, generated controversy, as did Truffaut’s essay, “A Certain
Tendency in the French Cinema” (1954), in which he attacked the “Cinema of Quality”
– “prestige” cinema of post-World War Two France - as lacking in originality and being
heavily reliant on literary classics. The directors Truffaut named as true auteurs –
Renoir, Bresson, Cocteau, Tati and Ophüls – wrote their own stories and dialogue, as
well as having a personal vision and identifiable visual style.
However, as Peter Wollen pointed out: “The auteur theory grew up rather haphazardly;
it was never elaborated in programmatic terms, in a manifesto or collective statement.
40 Edward Buscombe, "Ideas of Authorship," Screen 14.3 (1973): 78.
41 Kirsten Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (USA: McGraw-Hill, 1994)
494.