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Cahiers du Cinéma:

History

Started in April 1951 with:

Re-inventing the basic principles of Film Criticism and Theory

Joseph-Marie Lo Duca

Jacques Doniol-Valcroze

André Bazin

In Issue 31, 1954 François Truffaut, influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave, published:

"A Certain Tendency of French Cinema"

In this work he claimed that film is a great medium for expressing the personal ideas of the director. He suggested that this meant that the director should therefore be regarded as an auteur.

The publication was a direct attack to "Tradition of Quality" and "Author's Policy"

HOWEVER !

Pierre Bost & Jean Aurenche

According to Aurenche and Bost: The director has a secondary role of implementing their scenarios.

Truffaut initiated the idea of 'auteurism' authorship,

In film criticism, auteurism holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if he were the primary author

Which leads us to a question:

The value of a film remains purely on the basis of their subject matter? or on the ability of the director to tell the story (Mise en Scéne)?

Nevertheless... Fereydoun Hoveyda in 1961 on a special issue of Cahiers explained, that the form meaning 'La mise en scéne is overvalued by making a distinction against the 'subject-matter' or tellling the story. When both go hand in hand, both are correlative.

Cahiers' function in the history of film criticism appears as a shaking

loose of established modes, revolutionizing film criticism.

It overvalues the mise en scéne or form and its ability to account for

pleasure and excitement. Forgetting about the writing and other arts.

Extracts from Cahiers du Cinéma

Francois Truffaut, 'Une Certaine Tendence du Cinéma Francais'

"...these are audacities of hommes de cinéma (Filmmakers) and no longer of scenarists, metteurs en scéne, or littérateurs."

Fereydoun Hoveyda, 'La réponse de Nicholas Ray'

"...some critics keep harping bad to how necessary it is not

to neglect the importance of the screenplay, of the acting

of the production system... of course cinema is at the same

time a technique, an industry and an art, and like all art,

it borrows from other arts."

André Bazin, 'La politique des auteurs'

"...the politique des auteurs seems to me to hold and defend an essential critical true that the cinema needs more than the other arts, precisely because an art of true artistic relation in more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere."

  • Recognition of an industrial structure of cinema that supports the auteur's creativity
  • A tension between the auteur and his material 'interior meaning of the film'
  • Placement of the director within a hierarchical system
  • A naturalization of 'Politique' as a theory
  • Establishment of auteurism in American film criticism

1.- Technical competence as a criterion value

2.- The distinguishable personality of the director as a

as a criterion of value

Premises

3.- Interior meaning, the ultiment glory of the cinema

as an art. The sentiment and/passion prints of the director

in the film

"The auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table

of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography.

The auteur critic is obssesed with the wholeness of art and the artist.

He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole"

Rasing Kane by Pauline Kael

American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991.

Citizen Kane

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: Herman J. Mankiewicz (original screenplay), Orson Welles (original screenplay)

Stars: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and Dorothy Comingore

  • A deep analysis of the shooting script, book and film
  • It celebrates and dissects the realeased of Citizen Kane by Orson Welles
  • Examination the method or concept of auteurism
  • It's a list of likes and mostly dislikes of the film "Citizen Kane"
  • A discussion of who's the author Welles or Mankiewicz

"It is difficult to explain what makes any great work great, and particularly difficult with movies, and maybe more so with Citizen Kane than with other great movies, because it isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece."

I't's an essay that defends

and saves Mankiewicz reputation

as a writer and auteur of 'Citizen Kane'

"I think what makes Welles’s directorial style so satisfying in this movie is that we are constantly aware of the mechanics—that the pleasure Kane gives doesn’t come from illusion but comes from our enjoyment"

  • Famous sequence
  • Kane’s first marriage
  • Series of breakfasts, with overlapping dialogue
  • Shows a standard marriage as a joke,
  • It portrays banality of what goes wrong with the marriage

Citizen Kane is about the private life of a public figure whose scandals

and sensationalist life becomes a preffered subject for audiences rather than

politics or relevant issues, yellow press becomes real entertainment.

The audiences are only looking for the 'behind the scenes' and the dirty details

Fereydoun Hoveyda, 'La Réponse de Nicholas Ray'

"...some critics keep harping back to how necessary it is no to neglect the importance of the screenplay, of the acting, of the production system... of course cinema is at the same time a technique, an industry, and an art, and like all art it borrows from other arts."

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Andrew Sarris, American film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism

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