JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

INTRODUCTION

The auteur critics were united by the conviction that movies should tell a single tale. This tale begins with a man or a woman, the social animal, trapped in a state of solitude morale because he or she is neither in touch with his or her lowest human depths, nor with other people, nor with the spiritual dimension of life. In other words, the tale begins with a character in total isolation, a condition which is usually expressed visually in the films. Examples are legion. Nicholas Ray’s JOHNNY GUITAR (1954) begins with shots of the hero on his horse alone in the mountains. Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) opens with shots of the hero’s feet and lower legs. We do not see the character’s face for some time; the legs leave a cab, cross a busy city sidewalk, and enter a train station. No one walks with him or follows him. Rossellini’s EUROPE 51 (1952) begins with shots of Ingrid Bergman alone in an empty street. All the films praised by the auteur critics begin with the extreme physical, psychological, and spiritual isolation of the main character or characters.

As the tale develops, we find that under extreme, even violent circumstances, the hero is forced to discover his most base and humiliating aspects; he has reached the point at which his relationship to other people and ultimately to God becomes clear to him and to the audience as well. Johnny Guitar is brought face to face with his near-pathological penchant for violence, a condition which has always isolated him from the rest of society and alienated him from himself. Once this discovery is made, he can begin to develop; by the end of the film, he has extended himself to another person and the film ends with an idyllic scene in which he and Vienna (the heroine) kiss while standing in a running stream.

In EUROPE 51 the heroine is forced to see the meaninglessness of her life when her son, to whom she is “too busy” to pay attention, kills himself. She seeks a new way of life, first in political activity (very short and undeveloped) and then in social work. The more she extends herself to the poor people of the city, the more meaningful her life becomes. Finally, because her behavior embarrasses them, her family has her committed to an institution. But by this time, her worldly pride and blindness to God—the reasons for her earlier isolation—have disappeared and she serenely accepts her fate in the knowledge that she is in a state of grace. Eric Rohmer described the central action of the film: This film has for its subject the solitude of a soul in conflict with the narrow-minded incomprehension of some and the condescending solicitude of others. Through the traps of false duties, false doctrines, false religions, and false science, this soul opens up a way to charity, an, at the end of its human failure, it accedes to sainthood. (1) This narrative movement from solitude morale, to self-revelation, and, finally, to salvation either in a of contact with others (JOHNNY GUITAR) or in terms of contact with the divine (EUROPE 51) takes place in all the films praised by the auteur critics.

In order to understand why the auteur critics demanded that directors, to be considered artists, tell this tale and no other, we must examine their social, cultural, and aesthetic antecedents. Their taste in narrative, or, more properly speaking, their view of art’s function in the world, developed from their experiences during the chaotic 1940’s, previous French film criticism, and the philosophical/religious movement called Personalism (developed by Emmanuel Mounier and passed on to the auteur critics by Roger Leenhardt, Amedee Ayfre, and Andre Bazin). As a result of their cultural and social milieu, the auteur critics came to value the spiritual dimension of life more than participation in society. Their major aesthetic principles derived from this attitude toward life. These principles are:

1. that films should be as realistic as possible because the more closely the images on the screen correspond to the real world, the more clearly the images will reveal the human being’s relation to the infinite;

2. that the mise en scene (the composition of the visual image) (2) be constructed in such a way as to include those parts of the real world which most directly reveal “soul through appearance” ;

3. that the actors must, through identification with the roles and through the gestures they develop to express both themselves and the character they represent, reveal their spiritual dimension.

In the following analysis I will examine the cultural and political context out of which auteur criticism developed, the genesis and application of the above-mentioned aesthetic principles, and the auteur critics’ conception of how one overcame isolation by self revelation and achieved salvation.

THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT

When France was liberated in 1944, the French people experienced an overwhelming euphoria: there was great hope for a “New France” in which equality, justice, and prosperity for all would reign. But, as the 1940’s wore on, the old centers of power—business, the Church, and the military, in short, the bourgeoisie—reasserted themselves. By 1950 not only had all the collaborators been forgiven, if not rewarded, but the Resistance heroes were maligned and prosecuted as Communists or for their deeds during the Resistance. Under heavy pressure from the United States, France initiated its own brand of McCarthyism and was forced to participate in the Cold War. French politics moved steadily to the right from 1945 to 1950 until all the representatives of the working class were finally removed from participation in the government. Considering the many hardships, the external pressures, the Cold War, the fear of the Bomb, which was very intense in France, and the demise of any hope for a “New France,” it is no wonder that alienation, pessimism, and the search for some more rewarding inner dimension to life were strong among the young artists and intellectuals of this decade.

Throughout this period, the severe economic hardships, the constant instability of succeeding French governments, and the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria kept France in a state of turmoil. Thus at the beginning of the 1950’s, many French intellectuals, desirous of withdrawing from this chaotic situation, rejected the idea that art should be socially committed. In part, this rejection took the form of venomous attacks on Jean-Paul Sartre. It also took the form of a radical advocacy of art for art’s sake, a forceful return to the standard bourgeois conception of art as autonomous and out of time. For example, Eric Rohmer praised films such as Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, Renoir’s THE RIVER (1951), and Rossellini’s STROMBOLI (1949) because they were “out of their time enough to date less than others, but thereby better able to express the malaise and hopes of their time” (26, p. 18). Truffaut saw Wilder’s STALAG 17 (1953) as an “apology for individualism’s and asked his readers to praise all films which show that “the solutions are in us and in us alone” (28, p. 54). These four films’ told the story these critics valued—that of the individual’s personal salvation which consisted of a rejection of social values and concerns in favor of spiritual insight. Obviously these critics identified with these heroes and heroines who, in effect, rejected the world—they too, as disfranchised intellectuals, were painfully aware of their own solitude morale.

Auteur criticism was part of a series of developments in French film criticism produced by Roger Leenhardt, Andre Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, and Jean George Auriol. Leenhardt and Bazin made what Eric Rohmer called the Copernican Revolution in film criticism. Leenhardt, writing in the 1930’s, praised U.S. cinema and stressed the importance of its realistic photographic style which, he said, had as its goal the “complete transcription of reality with the minimum of interpretation.” (3) Previous criticism had posited that the artistic dimension of film lay in the artist’s ability to mould reality through montage and other techniques. Bazin furthered Leenhardt’s concern for the unity of reality, of time and space, and rejected montage in favor of the long take and deep focus. Rather than seeing the nature of film art in the malleability of the visual image, they chose to see it in “the crudely mechanical quality of reproduction of which the originality, the genius even, of photography consists.” (4) This conception of film art determined the auteur critics’ attitude toward realism in the cinema and their idea of mise en scene. The change of values which lay at the heart of the quest for spiritual salvation could not, according to these critics, be expressed through manipulation of the image and editing. The problem they concerned themselves with was man-in-the-world. To present man in his environment in such a way as to suggest the spiritual dimension of existence, the most accurate possible recording of the world in front of the camera was necessary.

Personalism was a loose amalgam of Existentialism and Christianity founded by Emmanuel Mounier in the 1930’s. Many well-known Catholic intellectuals wrote in Esprit, the journal Mounier founded in 1932, and espoused the Personalist world view. Deeply disturbed by the drift of modern civilization and disgusted by the role the Catholic Church was playing in this crisis, Mounier called for a spiritual revolution. Like Existentialists, he rejected all philosophical theories and systems, denied the possibility of complete and rational analysis of man and the world, and affirmed the need for choice and activity. Man, he believed, should take responsibility for his life. This choice and activity was to be directed toward the fullest development of the personal life; the goal was the integrated, rounded human being who lived in community with other “persons” and sought salvation for his soul.

Mounier called for the establishment of a new civilization through the spiritual rebirth of man, but he also demanded the dissociation of the spiritual and the political. In his opinion, the most important task was the “spiritual expansion of man.” (5) Mounier, while often using Marxian terminology and rejecting capitalism as an economic system, turned Marx’s analysis of social relationships on its head; instead of the economic basis determining the superstructure (philosophy, religion, law, art, etc.), the spiritual became the prime force in society. He admitted that modern society seemed to be determined by economic structures, but, he asserted, this was only because the spiritual state of man was at a low ebb. This fallen state of man and civilization was possible because man in the modern world (since the Renaissance) had lost his soul through perverted individualism.

It is not hard to see from the description above that the tale the auteur critics insisted on finding in the movies corresponds very closely to Mounier’s conception of man. Man is in a fallen state in a corrupt world. Hopeless as things seem, man still has the potential to break out of this state by first seeing his true condition and then extending himself to other people or to God. That this set of attitudes (hardly a systematic philosophy) influenced the auteur critics becomes even more clear when we realize that the free men who most influenced them—Roger Leenhardt, Andre Bazin, and Amedee Ayfre—were all Personalists. Leenhardt was the main film critic for Esprit in the 1930’s. Bazin helped reconstitute Esprit during the Occupation and wrote some of his earliest criticism in its pages. Amedee Ayfre, who is practically unknown in the United States, was a Jesuit priest and a close friend of Bazin. He became interested in the movies when he attended screenings at the Cinématheque française, where Bazin and the auteur critics spent most of their time. The aesthetic categories devised by the auteur critics can, as we shall see, only be explained in terms of this world view.

THE AESTHETIC PRINCIPLES

The prior analysis of the scene and the abstractions this introduces are eliminated by deep focus photography. This kind of photography puts the viewer into the same relationship to the film as is his relationship to reality itself.

Godard’s definition of mise en scene, admittedly a loose one, suggests three areas of inquiry. First, there is the demand that film represent and not express. Second, Godard emphasizes the genius of the director and posits an “inseparability” of director and camera. Third, and most important, Godard centers on the “movement of the actor within the frame.” Thus mise en scene, for Godard, consisted of the way of presenting the material, the relation of the artist to the material, and the functioning of the actor. Godard has suggested the necessary areas of inquiry, but we will have to go beyond Godard in order to explain the auteur critics conception of mise en scene.

It is only by careful observation of the appearances of things that their essence can be discerned. The auteur critics tended to be less metaphysical, less affected by the Personalism and phenomenology of the 1930’s; therefore they again shifted the emphasis from some kind of Baudelairean correspondences between nature and human emotions to human emotions alone—the movement of “the actor within the frame.” But the process is the same—the director must examine the appearance in order to penetrate to the essence, the inner life. Rohmer pointed this out in his discussion of EUROPE 51. Rossellini proves the existence of the woman’s soul “alone by the force of that which he offers to the eyes, the facial expressions, the attitude, the physical being of the woman and of those who surround her ...” (25, p. 45).

Valuing the presentation of “significant” actions and moments and valuing the telling of one tale represents a shift from Bazin’s conception of the film maker as passive, self-effacing observer to the auteur critics’ concept of the director as auteur. As previously stated, Godard emphasized the genius of the director and the “inseparability” of the camera and the director. Thus the director becomes the camera which records his perceptions: mise en scene is the director’s own individual way of looking at things. It is through the mise en scene that the director expresses himself.

Auteur criticism was, in fact, a very complicated way of saying something very simple. These critics wanted to see their own perception of the world on the screen: the individual is trapped in solitude morale and can escape from it—transcend it—if he or she come to see their condition and then extend themselves to others and to God. Whenever the auteur critics saw this tale on the screen, they called its creator an auteur.

At first it might seem odd to consider acting part of mise en scene; one tends to see acting as one more of the many aspects of-film making with directing, writing, camera work, and so forth. But the auteur critics considered acting and particularly the direction of acting one of the most important aspects of the director’s job. In fact they even made up the title directeur d'acteurs to indicate a director, such as Elia Kazan, who was especially noteworthy for his work with actors. In conventional film acting, borrowed primarily from the theatre, the auteur critics saw just one more aspect of the conventional cinema which they deplored. They sought a new method of acting which would express the story they wanted to see on the movie screen, a form of acting which would express the existential isolation of the individual. This they found in the acting Renoir elicited from his actors and in Stanislavski’s “method” which was brought into film acting by Elia Kazan in the 1940’s. Like the auteur critics, Stanislavski believed that “there is an unbreakable bond between the action on the stage and the thing which precipitated it. In other words, there is a complete union between the physical and the spiritual being of a role.” (9)

Truffaut praised Grahame for her own personality and her ability to present it on the screen—not for the ability she may or may not have had, to act a role in any conventional sense. Actresses and actors must free themselves or be freed by the director from the written dialogue—the most concrete presentation of the prescribed role. Truffaut complained, for example, that the acting of Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward in Henry King’s THE SNOWS OF KILAMANJARO (1952) “limits itself too much to underlining the competent dialogue of Casey Robinson” (23, p. 59).

“Don't act!” has always been the command of the film makers. As the Kuleshov experiments with the neutral close up of an actress’ face showed, the less acting the better. Bat the auteur critics went beyond this: movies were, in their minds, about the actors and actresses, rather than about fictional characters. It was the personality of a James Dean, a Gloria Grahame, an Anna Magnani, or an Ingrid Bergman which was the subject of a film. They conceived of the actor-character as being trapped in a state of solitude morale. The director had to break through this solitude ash the actor or actress to his or her limit until new insights were achieved, insights which would lead to salvation.

THE TALE ITSELF

We have examined the political and cultural context of la politique des auteurs; I have also discussed realism, mise en scene, and acting—the auteur critics’ chief aesthetic concerns. All of this we related to the simple tale—the narrative movement from solitude morale, to self-revelation, to salvation—which these critics insisted upon seeing in the movies. Finally, we will look at the details of this tale. In fact, we could say that these critics’ aesthetic concerns—realism, mise en scene, and acting—had to do with how a director presents la vie interieur itself.

It seems from this that the auteur critics had a very definite idea of what the inner life contained and of what aspects of its contents were most important. Jacques Rivette saw mise en scene not as a language but as a weapon which probed the heart and soul of the characters “in order to drive out their most ignored truths” (26, p. 51). These critics were not interested in the conventional psychological inner workings so typical of the usual stage play or novel; they were in search of a special moment.

Over and over again we find these critics concentrating on the moment of vertige (giddiness) and paroxisme, on the ability of the director or the actor to go jusqu'au bout (all the way), the moment when one stares into the abyss; the moment, in short, when one stares into one’s own vie interieur and sees oneself revealed as human, all too human. The presentation of this moment of illumination or lucidity was, for the auteur critics, the key to greatness in cinematic art. And the ability to transfer this moment to the audience, to make it the audience’s moment of paroxysm too was the final important step. Rivette, for example, found that Hitchcock wanted to hold the viewer in a state of instability and insecurity at the “extreme frontier where the last redoubts of the person struggle, but where the only significant victory is possible” (26, p. 50). For it is only in this extreme situation when the human spirit is tested as never before that true human worth can be revealed, that the human being can see and understand the nature of his or her solitude and give it up for love or for God.

Foremost, then, is the need of the individual (and each viewer as well) to plunge into his or her vie interieur and to reveal the deepest secrets and sins buried there in order to be free of them.

These lonely moral and spiritual struggles are at the center of the films considered important by the auteur critics. An auteur, therefore, is the director who most convincingly and most directly presents the fullness of this struggle by the most visual means possible: the human gestures and movements on the screen, the composition of the visual images—in short, the mise en scene. He or she must efficaciously and with technical competence present to and involve the audience in this existential struggle for reason, for human contact, and for salvation. This view of people is the essence of auteur criticism; the aesthetic construct erected above this basic world view is an elaborate justification and rationalization of this very limited view of what film can and should do. An examination of auteur criticism in England and the United States would reveal the same reactionary stance toward the world and the same limited view of art.

Notes

1.Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 25 (July, 1953), p. 45. All further citations from the Cahiers articles will be indicated in the text by issue number and page. All translations by Judith Hess and myself. Quotes from Godard and Bazin will be noted separately.

2. “Petite Ecole du spectateur,” Esprit, 4, no. 42 (March, 1936), p. 978.

3. 1 elaborate the meaning of mise en scene below, particularly how the term was used by the auteur critics. It should be noted that although borrowed from the French, the same term in English, and particularly in the U.S., has come to mean only set and lighting. Throughout this article I use the term in its original and much broader sense

4. Rohmer, Arts, no. 706 (Jan., 1959).

5. Revolution personatiste et communautaire, Paris, 1935, pp. IM_ 7

6. What is Cinema?, tr. Hugh Gray, Berkeley, 1971, Vol. 2, p .8. All further citations from Bazin will be indicated in the text by volume and page numbers in the English edition.

7. Godard on Godard, New York, 1972, p. 26. All further quotes fm Godard will be indicated by page number.

8. Jean Renoir, New York, 1973, p. 90.

9. An Actor’s Handbook, New York, 1963, p. 9.

10. Ibid, p. 16.