Where the auteurists chiefly differed from Bazin was in the delirious style of their cinephilia and their tendency to place directors of pop genres or assembly-line films alongside the work of more highly respected artists. One of their favorite devices for achieving these effects was the ten-best list, which could be used as a weapon against prevailing opinion. Godard announced not only the ten best films of each year but also such things as the “Ten Best American Sound Films” and the “Six Best French Films since the Liberation.” The typical list in Cahiers contained several key works of the New Wave together with such unexpected choices as Hatari! (1962) and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Both here and in their more discursive writings, the auteurists loved to elevate the lowbrow over the middlebrow. Godard was perhaps better than anyone at the technique, as when he remarked that “an alert Frank Tashlin is worth two Billy Wilders” (35). His reviews repeatedly took on a populist quality and balanced sophistication with idealism about certain Hollywood films. In most cases, he employed a language of puns, epigrams, and breathtakingly old-fashioned pronouncements. In 1952, writing under the name “Hans Lucas,” he answered Bazin’s question “What is Cinema?” with a single phrase, basing his response on auteurs like Griffith, Flaherty, Renoir, and Hitchcock: “the expression of lofty sentiments” (31).
Was he kidding? Yes and no. Godard’s Olympian statement illustrates one of the fundamental paradoxes of auteurism. Although the movement was youthful, impetuous, and romantic, it was often dedicated to antique virtues and to praising the work of directors who were entering their twilight years. Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot (1957), Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), and Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 (1965) were all made during roughly the same period as the early films of the New Wave; but they occupied a world apart from both the current Hollywood hits and the new European art cinema, as if they were still clinging to dated formulas or dead modes of production. Few mainstream critics in the Anglo-Saxon world took them seriously, but the auteurists passionately embraced them, sometimes ranking them above the same directors’ more celebrated films of the 1930s and ‘40s. One of the most sweetly charming features of auteurism lay in its love for old pros or cinematic father figures who were still alive, making unpretentious genre movies or quiet, meditative films such as Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Truffaut, who could be devastatingly sarcastic in some contexts, was quite touching when he spoke of such films, or when he used them to rebuke current fashions.
The paradoxes or tensions I’ve been describing—between old and new, between pop and modernism, between a humanist philosophy of photographic realism and a nascent idea of cinematic écriture—are also apparent in the early films of the New Wave. Truffaut’s directorial style, for example, rises out of two apparently incompatible approaches to cinema: Renoir’s free-flowing tolerance, which breaks down generic conventions, and Hitchcock’s “murderous gaze,” which exploits generic conventions to the utmost. Godard’s Breathless employs a similar dialectic, but the effect is much more conflicted or ambivalent. A highly personal movie (at least in the intellectual sense), it gives its auteur an opportunity to identify with both Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a French wise guy who is infatuated with everything American, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), a sensitive, rather intellectual young woman from America who fears that she might be getting too deeply involved with the underworld. The two facets of the director’s imaginary identity are represented in the form of a perversely romantic and failed relationship, much like the ones in Hollywood film noir; and the relationship is echoed in a dense pattern of allusions to two different kinds of text: genre movies, mostly associated with Michel, and high-cultural literature, music, or painting, mostly associated with Patricia. The film alludes not only to Aldrich, Fuller, Budd Boetticher, Otto Preminger, and Raoul Walsh, but also to William Faulkner, Rainer Maria Rilke, Louis Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire, and William Shakespeare. Godard is the implicit source of these allusions and is therefore identified with both the man of action and the would-be artist, with both the rebel and the conformist—although it may be significant that he makes a cameo appearance (imitating Hitchcock) as a man on the street who points out Michel to the cops.
The New Wave was fostered by postmodernity, but it retained residual features of romanticism and critical modernism. However it might be described, the important point is that French success in the art theaters gave the auteurist writings of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol a special authority. By the early 1960s the movement had spread far beyond France. In England, it influenced the best critics of the period, including Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat, Victor Perkins, Peter Wollen, David Thomson, and the group of writers associated with Movie. Over the next decade it had a similar influence in America, shaping the work of critic-filmmakers Paul Schrader and Peter Bogdanovich and eventually affecting “New American Cinema.” During the 1960s, its presence was quite strong in New York, where the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas briefly provided a space for auteurist criticism in the pages of Film Culture, where select revival cinemas featured retrospectives of Hollywood auteurs, and where Film Comment became an auteurist journal.
Manny Farber, who anticipated many of these developments, praised Hollywood’s “underground,” male-action genre movies and attacked the middlebrow or “quality” tradition in America (meanwhile persuading us that Howard Hawks, one of the most successful producer-directors of the previous two decades, was an underground artist). The most influential American exponent of auteurism, however, was Andrew Sarris, whose columns for The Village Voice and writings on directors in The American Cinema (1968) helped to establish what have become canonical works of classic Hollywood. Sarris’s book is filled with sharp but productive contradictions—a mixture of populism and elitism, of appeals to individual expression and vigorous praise for Hollywood. In his case, as in that of Godard, I’m reminded of a passage in Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” (1891), in which the wise aesthete Gilbert tells his friend Ernest that critical impressionism is a form of art. Gilbert confesses that the Mona Lisa never makes him contemplate Leonardo; on the contrary, he can never look at the painting without thinking of Walter Pater, who wrote a famous essay about it. For my part, I can never see A Time to Love and a Time to Die without thinking of Godard, and I can never see The Searchers without thinking of Sarris. Like the best critics, these two were not only what Wilde would call artists but also what Walter Benjamin would call producers. Writers on film, whether auteurists or not, can hardly expect to do more.
THE DEATH (AND SURVIVAL) OF THE AUTHOR
Auteurism profoundly affected Hollywood’s view of its own past and in the process enhanced the reputation of directors like Hawks and Hitchcock, who were making their late films at the height of the movement. It influenced the spread of college film societies, inspired a generation to write about film, and contributed to the growth of film studies as an academic discipline. In the Anglo-American world especially, academic film study proliferated in literature departments rather than in drama or art history departments. Literary specialists found auteurism compatible not only because it emphasized authors but also because it offered a provisional canon and a program for research into a vast, largely unexplored area of twentieth-century narrative; in addition, it required a scholarly effort to see everything, not for the purpose of cataloging or building an archive, but for the purpose of informed value judgments. To British auteurists such as Robin Wood, this project had something in common with the severely evaluative, somewhat antimodernist literary criticism practiced by F. R. Leavis and his followers at Scrutiny in the 1930s and ‘40s. Wood’s early writings also have something in common with the American literary critic Lionel Trilling’s espousal of “moral realism”; thus Wood began his famous book on Hitchcock with a chapter entitled “Why We Should Take Hitchcock Seriously” and went on to stress the “complex moral implications” of certain Hitchcock films (4). In more qualified fashion, the first edition of Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) concluded with the suggestion that film study might join forces with the dominant form of literary education: “Hitchcock is at least as important an artist as, say, Scott Fitzgerald, much more important than many other modern American novelists who have found their way on to the university curriculum. I do not think