Hollywood 1930-1990

The Cahiers Group

During WW2, foreign imported films were limited due to the nazi occupation of France.

After the war was over, though, a huge number of Hollywood films made their way into the country, and these strongly influenced the Caheirs group, a collective formed of cinephiles obsessed with filmmaking. Amongst others, the group contained celebrated filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, both of whom became associated with the French Nouvelle Vague (new wave).

With the arrival of so many imported Hollywood films, the Cahiers group recognised that certain directors (though not all) displayed common traits across their respective films, in spite of studio stipulations.

In Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Francais (1954), Truffaut developed 'la politique des auteurs', or auteur policy, with two overriding principles:
- Mise-en-scene is crucial to the reading of cinema and essential in film analysis and criticism
- The director's personal expression is key in distinguishing wether they should be afforded the title of auteur.

Auteur Theory

Definition
A film director whose personal influence and artistic control over his or her films are so great that he or she may be regarded as their author, and whose films may be regarded collectively as a body of work sharing common themes or techniques and expressing an individual style or vision.

The word means 'author' in French; the word derives from the prefix 'auto', meaning 'one'.

Andrew Sarris 

In Notes on the auteur Theory (1962), Andrew Sarris points out some of the flaws in Truffaut's Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Francais. He questions wether a director can be the 'author' of a film, and therefore wether he or she can be solely responsible for its distinctive quality.

In his eyes, auteur theory "makes it difficult to think of a bad director making a good film, and almost impossible to think of a good director making."



Problems with Auteur theory

One of the main criticisms of auteur theory is that filmmaking is a collaborative process: it involves a collective team of artists whose input is ignored when the theory is applied. Film theorist Peter Wollen refers to additional layers of film production as “noise”; spectators have to separate the ‘voice’ of the director from superfluous noise. This noise includes actors, producers and camera operators.

However, this ‘noise’ might also introduce other candidates for the role of auteur:

Actor

The actor has a huge presence on screen, but also in terms of marketing; the name of the star is more commonly used to advertise the movie than the name of the director. Consider a movie franchise such as The Terminator. The franchise is synonymous with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in four of the films. Could he be considered auteur of these movies? The same is true for Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise, or for actors associated with particular genres – Clint Eastwood and the western, for example, or Humphrey Bogart as the private detective.

Cinematographer

What many consider to be a film’s greatest strength will often be the visual style. Yet it is the cinematographer who captures a film’s angles and depth of field, for example, giving the film its ‘look’. Should we then consider the DOP (director of photography) as a film’s auteur. Gordon Willis is often credited with capturing the mood of the Godfather films through his cinematographic work.

Writer

Often overlooked as a creative force is the writer, whether of the screenplay or the original source material. The Coen Brothers, for example won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for No Country for Old Men, even though much of the dialogue was lifted directly from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Likewise, who should be considered author of the Lord of the Rings franchise? Tolkien, who wrote the novels, rich as they are in visual imagery? Peter Jackson, who directed the films? Or Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson, who wrote the screenplay?

Composer

Much of the meaning in any given film stems from the music. As Ken Loach once stated, “music is the whore of the film industry”. 

Consider the impact of any Christopher Nolan film. Is this generated by the director alone, or should Hans Zimmer be credited? So too Sergio Leone’s longstanding collaboration with Ennio Morricone, or Steven Spielberg with John Williams. What kind of a film would Jaws be without its brooding score?

Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author

Barthes’ Death of the Author was a work of literary criticism, but his arguments can equally be applied to film.

In this culturally-significant work, he argues that meaning of any given work comes not from the author but the reader. He believed that, in Western culture, too much emphasis is placed on the author. The reader is the interpreter, and there can be more than one definitive reading of a text. Thus, people emerging from a cinema will often have diverse views as to a film’s meaning. We’ll explore this in more detail in spectatorship.

A Final Point on Film as a Commercial Product

In The Commerce of Auteurism: A Voice without Authority (1990), Timothy Corrigan argues that, whilst issues of auteurism have typically revolved around artistry, films are also commercial products, and the “auteur as star” should be considered. 

A director is “a kind of brand-name vision whose contextual meanings are already determined”. So, we go into a Tarantino film with certain pre-conceived ideas of what it will look like.


Classical Hollywood Film Form

"Hollywood's success was based on telling stories clearly vividly, entertainingly. The techniques of continuity editing, set design, and lighting that were developed during this era were designed not only to provide attractive images but also to guide audience attention to salient narrative events from moment to moment."

In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, film theorists Bordwell, Staiger and Thopson describe the 'guidelines' for shooting a sequience in classical Hollywood style:

- The scene should first establish the time, place and relevant characters
- Location might be indicated with an exterior shot
- Characters then take over the narration
- The scene should reveal character's spatial positions (where they are located and their states of mind therein)

     

Conventions of classical Hollywood film form

- The narratives are a chain of events in cause and affect relationship
- The films were shot in a controlled environment, often on the studio lot, yet display verisimilitude
- They have invisible or continuity editing
- There is one main plot with a limited number of sub-plots.