The last point is important because many of the auteurists, including Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, were fledgling directors. Their call for “personal” cinema had been inspired to some extent by Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 essay “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” published in the socialist journal L’Écran français, which spoke metaphorically of the camera as a pen, the screen as a piece of paper, and the director as an author. Astruc, who was both a novelist and a director, emphasized the inscribable or lisable properties of mise-en-scène, locating them in the gestures of actors, the performance of dialogue, the movement or framings of the camera, and the interaction or relationship between objects and persons. The auteurists strongly supported such ideas and gave them apparent practical application by moving from critical writing into filmmaking. Meanwhile, their reviews and essays were filled with flamboyant descriptions of directors as existentialist authors. Godard remarked apropos of Ingmar Bergman, “The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page” (Godard on Godard, 76). Truffaut, speaking of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, declared, “It is easy to picture its author as a man overflowing with vitality, as much at ease behind a camera as Henry Miller facing a blank page” (The Films of My Life, 94).
As Godard amusingly observed, “Nothing could be more classically romantic” (76). But neither Godard nor auteurism can be so easily pigeonholed. To appreciate why, we need only look at a couple of paragraphs from Godard’s Cahiers review of the 1958 Douglas Sirk film A Time to Love and a Time to Die, starring John Gavin and Liselotte Pulver:
I am going to write a madly enthusiastic review of Douglas Sirk’s latest film, simply because it sets my cheeks afire. . . . In the first place I shall refer . . . to Griffith’s True-Heart Susie, because I think one should mention Griffith in all articles about the cinema: everyone agrees, but everyone forgets none the less. Griffith, therefore, and André Bazin, too, for the same reasons; and now that is done, I can get back to . . . A Time to Love and a Time to Die. . . . But here I pause for a moment to say that, next to Le Plaisir, this is the greatest title in all cinema, sound or silent, and also to say that I heartily congratulate Universal-International on having changed the title of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, which was called A Time to Live and a Time to Die. . . . By replacing the word “live” by “love,” they implicitly posed the director the question—an admirable starting-point for the script—“Should one live to love, or love to live?” And now, having finished my detour and comparisons: a time to love and a time to die—no, I shall never tire of writing these new, still imperturbably new, words, A Time to Love and a Time to Die: you know very well that I am going to talk about this film as I do about friend Fritz or Nicholas Ray, about You Only Live Once or They Live by Night, as though, in other words, John Gavin and Liselotte Pulver were Aucassin and Nicolette in 1959.
This, anyhow, is what enchants me about Sirk: this delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied Cinemascope. Obviously one must talk about all this as Aragon talks about Elsa’s eyes, raving a little, a lot, passionately, no matter, the only logic which concerns Sirk is delirium. (135–36)
This is a far cry from academic criticism and belies some of the assertions often made about auteurism. It’s customary (and not incorrect) to say that the young Cahiers critics were romantics—as when Thomas Schatz, in his valuable book The Genius of the System, tells us that auteurism “would not be worth bothering with if it hadn’t been so influential, effectively stalling film history in a prolonged stage of adolescent romanticism” (5). Many contemporary writers would agree; but if we’re going to call Godard a romantic, we should recognize that he’s a strange variant of the type. His review reads more like a wild, calculated mime of the “delirium” he finds in Sirk’s film; it’s a parody or pastiche of romantic gestures, a “madly enthusiastic” account of “Aucassin and Nicolette in 1959.”
One quality of parody is that we can’t always tell when it’s a full-out mockery. When Joyce opens the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses by writing, “The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace,” is he joking about the conventions of popular romance or acknowledging the seductive power of a certain kind of language? Is he engaging in a ventriloquist’s act or taking pleasure in “bad writing,” allowing his novel to become the thing it mimics? Godard’s review has exactly this sort of ambiguity, and if I were to quote it at length in the original French we would discover that it contains Joycean puns. (At one point, he derides “tous ces René qui n’ont pas les idées claires.”) He therefore resembles the modernists as much as the romantics. But he also has something in common with the historical avant-garde, which tended to welcome machine-made culture and its utopian possibilities. Like many of the auteurists, he’s in love with Cinemascope; at a later point in his review he disputes what he calls the “fashionable” idea that “the wide screen is all window dressing” and remarks that Sirk’s camera movements “give the impression of having been done by hand instead of with a crane, rather as if the mercurial brushwork of a Fragonard were the work of a complex machine.” Throughout, he employs a familiar avant-garde strategy: he appropriates a high-culture style and turns it on its head; he half-comically apes the conventions of “serious” criticism (“I think one should mention Griffith in all articles about the cinema . . . and André Bazin, too”) in order to challenge complacent assumptions about authorship and art.
The particular avant-garde with which Godard’s review has affinities is surrealism. Although Positif had direct connections with the surrealists and sometimes attacked the critics at Cahiers, the two groups were in many ways similar. Both were fond of American films, particularly of B movies and film noir, and both sometimes used a lyrical, almost swooning language—as when Godard tells us that A Time to Love and a Time to Die sets his cheeks afire. It’s no accident that at one point in his review Godard alludes to the surrealist Louis Aragon, and it’s almost predictable that he should proclaim A Time to Love and a Time to Die (next to Le Plaisir) as the “greatest title in all of cinema.” At this point in his career he seems a dreamer of mass culture, looking for what André Breton had called “moments of priceless giddiness” (quoted in Hammond, 20). His review seems also to have a quasi-surrealistic conception of authorship, as when he tells us that the power of A Time to Love and a Time to Die rises out of Universal-International’s mercenary decision to change the title of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. By this means, Godard suggests, the studio unleashed a ghost in the machine, giving the director an opportunity to set beauty and delirium in motion.
I don’t want to overstate the connection with the surrealists; my point is simply that Godard’s writing is made up of a mixture of familiar attitudes and can’t be identified completely with any of them. It blends the voice of high culture with movie reviewing and blurs the boundaries between romantic aestheticism, modernism, and the historical avant-garde. It reminds us of things we’ve heard before but also sounds different and new. In some respects, Godard in 1959 resembles what we would nowadays call a postmodern critic.
“Postmodern” needs to be used guardedly because it suggests a quite un-Godard-like disavowal of a philosophical “center.” Even so, it helps to indicate an important fact about the auteurists’ place in film history. The classic cinema’s technology and modes of production had grown out of the period when oil replaced steam and coal as a primary fuel, when “Fordism” became the chief means of industrial organization and when mechanical inventions proliferated at a dizzy rate. (One of the Lumières’ first movies showed a train arriving at a station, as if the most important machine of the new era were paying tribute to its predecessors.) Auteurism, by contrast, emerged in the declining years of the studio system, at the dawn of the television age. Although the auteurists and their earliest followers in Britain and America nourished their cult enthusiasms at revival theaters and museums, they belonged to a generation that would begin to use TV like a cinematheque, viewing films in no historical order and regarding the classic cinema as something distant or dying. Over the next decade, widespread