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Influence of Politique Des Auteurs in the Making of 400 Blows and Breathless

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Influence of Politique Des Auteurs in the Making of 400 Blows and Breathless Influence of politique des auteurs in the making of 400 Blows and Breathless Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 2 2. Returning to the origins of “la politique des auteurs” ........................................................ 2 3. Truffaut’s 400 Blows .......................................................................................................... 4 4. Godard’s Breathless ............................................................................................................ 7 5. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 9 References ................................................................................................................................ 11 1 1. Introduction “La politique des auteurs” is a style of film critique created in the time of 1950s Paris, by the “Cahiers group” consisting of Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. The “Cahiers group” sought to bring about cinematic transformations, to articulate their own distinctive aesthetic characteristics with the potential of destabilising the French critical establishment and their established cinematic ideologies (Godard, 1986, pp. 195). The “Cahiers group” promoted their idea of cinema as art in two ways, the first through the polemical criticism in their film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, and the second through engaging in the art of filmmaking itself. As a concept which is embraced and demonstrated through the practice of filmmaking itself, it is evident that the politique des auteurs would have influenced the ways in which directors conducted the filmmaking process itself. This essay seeks to adopt the “Cahiers group’s” vision of the auteur to analyse the ways and extent through which politique des auteurs informed filmmaking practices of New Wave directors, in particular how the concept came to influence the auteur’s creation of a cinematic language and art for personal expression through the mise-en-scène. The essay will focus on two directors and their works, namely 400 Blows by Truffaut and Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard. The essay will comprise three sections, the first introducing the genesis and purpose of politique des auteurs to justify this essay’s adoption of the concept as a political struggle for authorship. The second section will discuss how politique des auteurs influenced Truffaut’s making of 400 Blows while the third will focus on Godard’s Breathless. 2. Returning to the origins of “la politique des auteurs” Politique des auteurs draws inspiration from the early work of Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. In Astruc’s (1948, pp. 31) article “The birth of a new avant-garde: la caméra-stylo”, Astruc calls for filmmakers to use film as a “means of personal expression” by using the camera to depict their worldviews. Astruc (1948, pp. 32) draws a parallel between a filmmaker and a writer or painter, attributing the role of the filmmaker to one who develops a language of cinema to rival the depth of the written word, that the director should be a cinematic artist using 2 the mise-en-scène as cinematic expression on screen, a style which he named caméra-stylo (camera-pen). Bazin (1957) advanced Astruc’s (1948) camera pen filmmaking style, positioning the auteur as a director who instils life into film, and that the film should be a representation and expression of the director’s vision on a personal level. Bazin, (1957, pp. 255-258) describes an auteur as “choosing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of reference, and then of assuming that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next”, albeit cautioning against making judgements of films based solely on an auteur perspective for it runs into the danger of an emerging “aesthetic personality cult” and “the negation of the film to the benefit of praise of its auteur”. Techniques promoted by Bazin (1957) include the use of long takes and a mise-en-scène instead of the montage to establish an ethical relationship between the spectator and the filmmaker. The term politique des auteurs first emerged in the cinematic lexicon through the work of Francois Truffaut (1954) in his essay A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema. Truffaut (1954) adopted the ideologies of Astruc (1948) and Bazin (1957) to argue that the tools presented to the director were akin to that of an author’s pen, enabling the director to articulate his/her vision. An auteur is one with a distinctive style and theme that would be recognisable across all his/her films, elevating the status of the director to one above the screenwriter (Truffaut, 1954). The guiding principles of politique des auteurs demonstrates it to be a politics based around authorship enacted through the creation of an aesthetic language. Politque des auteurs was a political manifesto embodied by the director, expressed through Truffaut’s (1954) “look[ing] through a camera eye-piece”, the cinema which Godard considered to be “magic” on screen. The political aspect came to be diluted as politique des auteurs evolved through the years, such as in the 1960s when scientific legitimacy was used to give the concept an objective approach rather than a romantic subjectivity of the 1950s, and in the introduction of the spectator-screen concept in which Barthes (1968) argues that all meaning is produced by the reader, pronouncing the auteur dead and the “birth of the reader”. Hayward (2006, pp. 31-38) writes that the concept of the auteur has been subjected to various changes through structuralism, post structuralism and post modernism, and has now returned 3 to be part of the cinematic language. As Dudley (2000, pp. 29) announces that “we are permitted to mention, even to discuss the auteur again”, this essay seeks to return to the critical paradigm of the “Cahiers group”. This article finds alignment with Marie’s (2003, pp. 28) perspective that films made by the ‘Cahiers group’ of young directors between 1958 to 1964 marked the beginning of coherence in critical thinking and cinematic style. Marie (2003, pp. 70-71) defined a list of creative production strategies and aesthetic styles characteristic of the paradigm of politique des auteurs, namely (1) auteur director as scenarist,, (2) improvisation in the conceptualisation of dialogues, sequences and acting, (3) shooting in natural settings is preferred, with avoidance of artificial sets in studios, (4) use of small crew, (5) the director chooses “direct sound” recording in the filming process over post synchronisation, (6) non-professionals as actors, and (7) newbie professionals preferred and directed with more flexibility than traditional productions. In the following sections, the author returns to the concept of politique des auteurs as a political struggle over authorship (directorship) to examine the extent to which 400 Blows and Breathless reflected or departed from the aesthetic values of politique des auteurs defined by Marie (2003). 3. Truffaut’s 400 Blows Truffaut’s (1954) work demarcated a strong boundary between (1) the supporters of cinematic authorship and (2) those in favour of the established mode of French commercial cinema with its Tradition of Quality whereby novels were translated into film scripts by studio writers for the production of a work of “psychological realism”. Truffaut (1954) positioned the director as the author of the film, stating that “there are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors”, and that great directors are identifiable by the distinct style and themes in their films. Truffaut (1954) criticised directors who abide by a scriptwriter’s script and limit their inputs to that of adding pictures and actors to be technicians and “metteurs-en-scène”, those with technical competency but lacking in a personal cinematic style. Truffaut expressed his dislike for psychological realism which distorts realistic portrayal, one which “lock” characters “in a close world […] instead of letting us see them for themselves, with our own eyes. The artist cannot always dominate his work”. The above ideologies are to 4 a large extent reflected in Truffaut’s making of 400 Blows released in 1959, which won the Cannes Film Festival Award for best director and enabled the intellectual strivings of New Wave directors to gain a foothold in mainstream cinema. 400 Blows is set in post-war France, about a 12-year-old boy, Antoine Doinel, who lives in a small flat with his stepfather and his mother, both of whom are poor and relatively inattentive to his needs. Antoine’s family problems were made more unbearable by a domineering teacher at school. Misunderstood as a troublemaker by both his parents and teacher, Antoine’s only escape was to run away, visit the cinema and fairground with his one friend, Rene. Truffaut’s commitment to a highly personal cinema is evident in 400 Blows, which was an autobiographical film portraying Truffaut’s personal, troubled childhood experiences in which he was neglected by parents who were absorbed in their personal interests, had a few minor arrests in his adolescent years, was deserted from the army and eventually discharged for being “medically” unfit to serve (Turner, 1984). In the film, Antoine was sent to a reformatory school by his stepfather for stealing a typewriter, a scenario which is reflective of Truffaut’s own life as his own father sent him to a centre
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