The Rise

In film theory, the 1950s-era auteur theory holds that a director’s films reflect that director’s personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary “auteur” (the French word for ‘author’). In some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar “auteur” role for films that they have produced.

A present day analogy would the ‘writer-director’ and having control over the final cut or director’s cut of a film.

Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. ‘Auteurism’ is the method of analyzing films based on this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director’s work that makes her or him an auteur. Both the auteur theory and the auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical Cahiers du cinéma.”

The French New Wave officially kicked off in 1959 with the release of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and immediately picked up with the release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) which was co-written by Truffaut. These revolutionary feature film efforts were the product of experimentation with various short-films throughout the mid and late 1950s by these film critics-turned-filmmakers.

This was around the same time that the likes of Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsey Anderson started the new wave in Britain, the result of several documentary film projects undertaken in the 1950s as part of the Free Cinema Movement. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) were the fore-runners of the British New Wave. Interestingly, 1959 was also the year when John Cassavetes, an established Hollywood actor started his own revolution of independent cinema with the film Shadows (1959).

These revolutions leaked into other parts of the world like Germany where the likes of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders started the “New German Cinema” movement. Then the wave turned direction and headed eastwards through India with the likes of Satyajit Ray coming out as an established filmmaker with the closure of the “Apu trilogy” in 1959. The wave failed to rise to dizzy heights in the sub-continent but went onto generate a large following further east in Japan with the rise of the “Nuberu Bagu”, the localized name for the “Japanese New Wave”. Shohei Imamura is widely regarded as the key figure of this movement with a surprise association of the already established Seijun Suzuki’s certain works.

All these filmmakers mentioned above have been widely regarded as “auteurs” of their cinema by critics and audiences alike and suddenly the term had transformed the previously mechanical role of the film director into the most important and creative post on the crew. The producer’s prestige of the pre-new wave, industry-controlled era had come to a screeching halt and side-stepped to play second fiddle to the director.

Classic cinema lives

Hero

     Many of the great directors who had defined the classical studio era from the period of World War I to the early age of television were at or approaching retirement. Andrew Sarris’s pivotal book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 came out just in time to elevate their reputations by dubbing them with the fashionable French term auteur.
     John Ford and Howard Hawks made their last films in this period (7 Women, 1966, and Rio Lobo, 1970). Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Vincente Minnelli kept driecting into the 1970s, though few would say their late films stacked up to their earlier ones. Preminger did manage to struggle back after a string of turkeys to make a very creditable final film, The Human Factor, in 1980. Sam Fuller kept working through the 1980s, but he had to go to France to do it. Billy Wilder’s last film came out in 1981.  Most people wish he had stopped with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in 1970.The decline of these greats coincided with the rise of the New Hollywood generation, whose directors, originally dubbed “the movie brats,” have become the grand old men of the current cinema. It also coincided with the early rumblings of the blockbuster (Jaws, 1975) and franchise (Star Wars, 1977) age that we know today. Definitely a shift took place in the 1970s, but to what?

     Many film historians have claimed that the films that have come out of Hollywood since roughly the end of the 1980s are radically different from those of the classical “Golden Age.” Factors like television, videogames, spectacular special effects, moviegoers with short attention spans, the internet, the acquisition of the old studios by multi-national corporations, and the resulting rise of franchises have all given rise to a “post-classical” cinema. This phenomenon is sometimes also referred to as the “post-Hollywood” or “post-modern” era.

     I’m suspicious of the “post” terms, vague as they are. Usually stylistic labels describe what something is, not what it follows. Do we speak of “post-silent” or “post black-and-white” cinema?

It’s amazing to think of it now, but back in the late 1970s, virtually no one had studied the traditional norms of Hollywood filmmaking. We all knew what the distinctive traits of the great auteurs were, but distinctive as opposed to what? Academics kept saying that someone should figure out just what the cinema of the classical studio era consisted of. What principles guided filmmakers? What assumptions did they share? Not realizing how much material was available on Hollywood cinema and mode of production that composed the “classical Hollywood cinema.”

The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985). I now feel like I have a better knowledge of exactly how and why their work differed from standard filmmaking.