What is the politique des auteurs and how important is it in relation to Andre Bazin’s realist film theory?

Theorist Andre Bazin was always looking for the "art of the real" (1,137), beyond film to reality, and subsequently beyond the director. So while he used the politique des auteurs it was with caution and moderation, as Bazin was not interested in the image of the creator but that of reality. For if an author is his film, then where is his subject?

The politique des auteurs, the notion that a "film-maker and his films are one" (3,249) was a practise made popular (and still used today) by writers of the influential journal Cahiers du Cinema such as Francois Truffaut ("there are no works, only auteurs"), and Eric Rohmer ("it is the auteurs, not the work that remains") in the forties and fifties. It was a view which made celebrities of directors, both past and present, deservedly and not, and one which today is still contested.

The relationship between a work and its so-called creator is one full of complexities and subtleties. The fact that in cinema that relationship is the most complex of all art forms, gives the politique a worthy ambition. How Bazin’s realistic theories deal with that allows him an even greater challenge.

Bazin was not as black and white with his use of the politique des auteurs, although he did use it to complement his other tricks of the trade. For Bazin believed, contrary to his colleagues, that cinema was the most open to compromise, that the work "transcends" the director and all else, and is an entity in itself. This latter point is central to Bazin’s basic realist theory. For him, cinema offered a "tracing" or "fingerprint" of the world, a death mask of society. Cinema’s job was to continually re-invent itself with technological advances in order to one day allow a total representation of nature. He believed that the realism offered by cinema followed from its photographic nature and that "not only does some marvel on the screen not undermine the reality of the image, it is its most valid justification". (2) And the most essential element of that was that "man plays no part".(3)

This point drove his reading of the politique des auteurs, as how could a director claim outright authorship over a work, if the very beauty of cinema is that it is an automatic procedure "without the creative intervention of man" and that it (cinema) "derives an advantage from his absense"? Bazin saw the camera as a physical process simply put in front of another physical object and that any tampering or touch up would be a disadvantage. He would later justify any developments in cinema such as sound, colour or Cinerama as simply efforts made to "perfect representation of reality" and not to oppose it. (1,139). As pointed out by Brian Henderson, Bazin put his belief more in the "naked power of the mechanically recorded image than on the learned power of artistic control over such images". (1,134). For him the shot was all important."Film art is complete and fully achieved in the shot itself. If the shot stands in proper relation to the real, then it is already art," Henderson said. (6,27) This belief, which Henderson countered was a limiting one, was in direct contrast to that of the formalists before him such as Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisentstein, VI Pudovkin, and Bela Balaza who pushed for cinema to be an art form "beyond realism" (5,3).

Bazin however stood firm with his love of the "art of the real", a stance which forced him to make a distinction between himself and his Cahiers colleagues on a number of issues raised by the politique des auteurs. Among those was the suggestion that the practise is simply creating an elite club of directors, and that the so-called irrefutable relationship between a film and its director was enough to save the chosen few (auteurs) from making a lemon. "It follows that the best adherents of the politique des auteurs get the best of it, rightly or wrongly ... so that Hitchcock, Renoir, Rossellini, Lang, Hawks, or Nicholas Ray, appear as infalliable directors who could never make a bad film". (3,248).

Bazin argued that the "chancy" nature of film practise made it possible for the best directors to make a bad film, and the worst directors to make a good film.

His point was that talent or genius also has a context, an "historical combination of circumstances, and a technical background which to a large extent determine it". This

technical background is of course more prevalent in cinema that the other arts as it is both "popular and industrial". "One would have to admit that this inspiration always comes up against a whole complex of circumstances which make the result a thousand times more chancy than in painting or literature" (3, 242). Bazin points out that this is particularly true of American filmmaking, as while directors have access to the latest in technology they are also subjected to market forces.

He said despite the commercialism at the foundation of Hollywood, it could "not help being spontaneous" and was able to "show American society just as it wanted to see itself" not passively, but dynamically. In what he described as "America’s cinematic genius", they produced the truest and most realistic cinema of all because it does not shrink from depicting even the contradictions of that society" (3,252).

He makes the point however that that genius is not in the individual but the system where authorship, as mentioned earlier, over a film is tenuous at best. "The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable. That is not on the talent of this or that film-maker, but the genius of the system." This system if of course also at the heart of Bazin’s concept of realism - his doctrine of "social truth". "This is not offered as a goal that suffices in itself but is integrated into a style of cinematic narration." (3,258).

"Politique des auteurs seems to hold and defend an essential critical truth that the cinema needs more than the other arts, precisely because an act of true artistic creation is more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere." But he argues that using it could lead to other dangers such as the demotion of a film in preference to spotlighting a director, and this hierarchy should be avoided. "Mediocre auteurs can, by accident, make admirable films, and conversely, a genius can fall victim to an equally accidental sterility," he said.

Where does this leave the director, or auteur? Where does their personal vision fit into the wider vision of American society? Bazin’s answer is not clear, only in that the successful ones are those who can ride the technology wave alone with cinema’s growth. "His artistic course has to be plotted according to the current" (3,252) and that even genius is reliant on its "moment in history". His talk of "precarious moment of balance between talent and milieu" is even more prevalent in cinema due to the pace at which technological advances have been made. "Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising that the genius will burn himself out 10 times as fast, and that a director who suffers no loss of ability may cease to be swept along by the wave". He said this adds to their claim on being an auteur. (To illustrate the chancy nature of Hollywood, Brian De Palma was originally going to do Taxi Driver with Al Pacino in the lead. What would this have done to Scorsese’s career?)(10,241).

To this point of riding the wave he raises the issue of Orson Welles and that supporters of the politique des auteurs would argue that Confidential Report was a better film that Citizen Kane, because the director should have been better at his craft 10 years on and it would have more of Welles’ stamp on it. This is unlike Kane, where people like his cameramen Gregg Toland had so much effect on the look of the film (with its depth-of-field which buys into Bazin’s love of realism). This is one of the few areas where he agrees wholeheartedly with his colleagues. "The drama does not reside in the growing old of men but in that of the cinema, those who do not know how to grow old with it will be overtaken by its evolution". (3,255).

{At the time of his writing, he justifiably pointed to the many advances cinema had made toward realism such as neo-realism and composition in depth which integrated the visual continuity of silent cinema with the "added realism" of sound" (6,47). Henderson argued that film history since Bazin’s death had reversed this - that advances have increased "the expressive resources of realism in Bazin’s sense, but over every other form and style of cinema also".)

One area where he did not agree with his colleagues however was the subjective nature of the practise, particularly as it so reliant on an initial choice of auteurs. Directors would first have to fit in to a strict criteria set out by the critics before they were allowed into a realm where they could then by judged on their consistency of idea over a series of films.

The selection of an auteur was disputed. As pointed out by Bazin, Nicholas Ray or Rossellini are auteurs, but not John Huston (African Queen). "So this conception of the auteur is not compatible with the auteur/subject distinction, because it is of greater importance to find out if a director is worthy of entering the select group of auteurs than it is to judge how well he has used his material." (3,255). He argued that to some extent the "auteur is a subject to himself, whatever the scenarios, he always tells the same story, or in case the word story is confusing, let’s say he has the same attitude and passes the same moral judgment on the action and on the characters".

"All they want to retain in the equation auteur plus subject equals work is the auteur, while the subject is reduced to zero," he said. (3,255). He argued that if a director is linked so closely to his film, it "assumes at the start of its analysis that the film is automatically good as it has been made by an auteur. This is all right so long as there has been no mistake about promoting this film-maker to the status of auteur." (3,255) "It is unfortunate to praise a film that in no way deserves it, but the dangers are less far reaching than when a worthwhile film is rejected because it director has made nothing good up to that point," he said. (3,256) "This does not mean one has to deny the role of the auteur, but simply give him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept. Auteur, yes, but what of?" (3, 258).

"The politique des auteurs consists, in short, of choosing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of reference, and then assuming that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next." He also points to the obvious flaws in such a system - that certain important films "escape this test", while run-of-the-mill films which have the "personal stamp" of an auteur will be viewed too closely and generously. "And as soon as you state the film-maker and his films are one, there can be no minor films, as the worst of them will always be in the image of the creator" (3, 250).

A personal stamp was an altogether different thing to Bazin, who believed neutrality showed up the true auteur - someone who is judged not from changing reality but what selection they made from it. Neutrality of course lends weight to Bazin’s argument that authorship is a subtle term, and the one who doesn’t show their hand so overtly is the one to watch for such as Welles or Jean Renoir who "uncovered the secret of a film form ... without chopping (montage) the world up into little fragments, that would reveal hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them."(16)

This distrust of montage ("where meaning is only in the shadow of the image"(19)) was also a pivotal aspect of his want of realism. It meant to him, among other things, the sacrifice of personal choice on the part of the viewer and ambiguity so integral to retaining "contact with life.(7,170) "We have seen that Bazin believed that the world has a sense, that it speaks to us an ambiguous language if we take care to attend to it, if we silence our own desire to make that world signify what we want it to," Dudley Andrews wrote. (23). "In analysing reality, montage presupposes of its very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event," Bazin said. (24) This last point put too much faith in what the director for Bazin wanted the viewer to see. It also brings up the issue of the accidental and its underuse in cinema, as noted by Noel Burch. (5,115).

All this aside, it is difficult to remove oneself from the main obstacle of the politique des auteurs, that of its overt subjectivity. As raised by Bazin himself how can one "trust our own criticism over the genius of the film-maker". "This is where the practise falls in line with the system of criticism of beauty, in other words, when one is dealing with the genius, it is always a good method to presuppose the a supposed weakness in a work of art is nothing other than a beauty that one has not yet managed to understand." Cinema of course has "countless sociological and historical cross currents". (3,255)

This reliance on "people of taste" to formulate a roundtable of shining auteurs, is something Bazin himself fell to occasionally. According to Henderson, Bazin’s work could be divided into two categories - the ontological (his worst) and historical (his best). He said Bazin’s love of Chaplin bypassed the usual need for historical context, giving the comic his very own. As pointed out by Henderson, the reason is that Bazin treats Chaplin as his own history, Monseiur Verdoux and Limelight refer back to Chaplin’s early films, which Bazin sees as the worldwide myth of cinema itself. No other historical relation is necessary." (6,35). ". "It is ahistorical: it does not matter when these films were made or what is their relation to movements or style. The film-maker is in no sense the subject of inquiry; his is merely the name to which credit or blame is ascribed. The sole category of this criticism is relation of camera and event." (6,37).

However in his best work, the analysis of his much championed neo-realist film-makers, he maintained some historical context and thus saved his criticism. He did so by "relating the work of each director to his earlier work, and by comparing the style of each to those of other artists" in the movement. (6,36). "He never asked whether Rossellini or Viconti is the most realist, he asks how each approaches reality, sees, understands, shapes it. Putting this question rather than the other (who is closest to reality) shifts emphasis from reality and its valid reproduction to style, temperament, world view of the individual artist". (6,39).

According to Henderson, Bazin could achieve this as his essential term, realism, was a "rubbery one". "He uses it to describe the particular qualities of a director’s style: he speaks of Visconti’s aesthetic realism, Fellini’s poetic realism. Realism becomes the name of the problem to be solved, a kind of x. Realism is Bazin’s touchstone or basic critical concept, but it remains in itself a blank or open term ... it become diluted." He uses it describing directors of such diverse style as Murnau, Stroheim, Welles, Rossellini.

No doubt Bazin would also use it to have modern auteurs such as Martin Scorsese, at least on the strength of films such as Mean Streets and Goodfellas. Indeed Bazin’s followers have done it for him. In the latest Projections 7, excepts are lifted from the 500th issue of Cahiers, in which Scorsese was given the role of honourary editor. The editors felt he was the "American auteur par excellence" and an "auteur in the fullest sense of the word". In an essay by Nicolas Saada, his film Casino was revered for finding an equilibrium between his great "realistic films" (Mean Streets, Raging Bull) and "abstract works" (Taxi Driver, King of Comedy). "Casino takes off from realist material and transforms itself before our eyes into a world of spell-binding images". (32). In a later review it is even suggested that Jean-Luc Godard would be "jealous" over one of the sequences. They may be a little put out by the knowledge that in the same issue it was revealed by editor Thelma Schoonmaker that Scorsese had in fact "studied" opposing formalist Eisenstein and that he "loved to watch how the juxtaposition of two shots can create something new", and that the editing was his favourite part of the process (25).

While Bazin admits there is no "all-purpose yardstick" for criticism and that it all starts with some bias, the best of criticism can learn from the politique des auteurs. But as pointed out by Bazin works are products not of an "artist, but of an art, not of man, but of a society" (3,250). Does an audience need to know the name of a director to enjoy the film? (3,251) And if there is nothing but the author, what are they the author of?

1. Andrews, J Dudley, The Major Film Theories, Oxford University Press, London, 1976.

2. Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema?, Vol 1, Berkley, University of California Press, 1967.

3. Bazin, Andre, Cahiers du Cinema, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1985.

4. (Ed) Boorman and Walter Donohue, Projections 7, Faber and Faber, London, 1997.

5.Burch, Noel, Theory of Film Practice, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1981.

6. Easthope, Anthony (ed), Contemporary Film Theory, Longman Publishing, New York, 1993.

7. Henderson, Brian, A Critique of Film Theory, EP Dutton, New York, 1980

8. Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film, Oxford University Press, London, 1960

9.Phillips Julia, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, Ruthless Productions, London, 1991.