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Beyond Auteurism
New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s
By Rosanna Maule Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-255-7
CHAPTER 1
The Film Author and the Survival of European Cinema
Besides identifying subjectivity in films as a source of expression and signification traceable via aesthetic and thematic motifs, the notion of authorship in the cinema signals an attempt to demarcate individual agency and orientation within the plurality of practices related to film production, distribution, and reception. In this respect, the establishment of the film auteur as a prominent category in film points to not only what Dana Polan describes as an irrepressible 'desire' for differentiating films and to categorize them through criteria borrowed from the other arts (2001), but also, as Timothy Corrigan appropriately observes, 'a commercial strategy for organizing audience reception, a critical concept bound to distribution and marketing aims that identify and address the potential cult status of an auteur' (1991: 103). Corrigan highlights some of the circumstances that consolidated the film auteur as an aesthetic and promotional category within the contemporary film industry. One such factor is the 1950s and 1960s expansion of production and distribution systems and initiatives as fostered by the advent of lightweight equipment and 'the desire and demand of an industry to generate an artistic (and specifically Romantic) aura during a period when the industry as such needed to distinguish itself from other, less elevated, forms of mass media (most notably, television)' (ibid.: 102).
In Western Europe, film authorship emerged as a marketing value at various times and in different circumstances. In its 1950s heyday, the art film directors consolidated European cinema's prestige within the international art house circuit. At the end of the decade, the author had become not only an important approach to film because of auteur criticism, but also a cinematic mode and a promotional category of its own, endorsed by government subsidies and public institutions aiming at maintaining a distinctive niche in the art house film circuit. From this perspective, author cinema in Western Europe represents more than just an aesthetic concept and is strictly intertwined with the industrial, economic, and cultural interests of the film systems, as well as the national and transnational priorities of the Member States of the European Community.
The national specificity of film authorship
In Western European cinema the figure of the film author as a sociology-of-production resulted from the interplay of cultural politics and economic structures in national film systems. The precursor of the film author in Western Europe is the Italian neo-realist film-maker, a socially committed intellectual with a strong hold on the practical aspects of film-making. Georges Sadoul summarizes the defining characteristics of neo-realist cinema as such: location shooting, lengthy takes, unobtrusive editing, natural lighting, non-professional cast, contemporary subjects, low-class protagonists, and vernacular dialogue (Marcus 1986: 21–22). Neo-realism was also the result of historical circumstances that brought film production outside the closed-down studios of a dismembered film industry, into spontaneous sets and locations (Cannella 1973). Indeed, many Italian neo-realist film directors who had an ethical urgency to report on the tragic events of their time had had their early professional experiences in the film industry of the fascist regime. Because of the antifascist pressure of the resistance and of the post-war period, these film directors became exclusively identified with an ethical agenda: that of bearing witness to the country's conditions after the hardship of the long conflict and especially the dramatic situation following the 1943 Armistice.
In many ways, the same motivations that constituted the convictions of neorealist cinema informed the new aesthetics emerging in France, Italy, and Spain throughout the 1950s and 1960s, although in quite different political and economic circumstances. As in Italian neo-realism, the limited budgets and the unavailability of professional sets also determined the aesthetic of the New Wave film authors and their penchant toward on-location settings, realist representation, and contemporary themes. At the same time, the New Wave filmmaking methods in France, Italy, and Spain reflected a generational reactions against, respectively, the conservative, outdated, or oppressive hegemonic formations of these three countries. Hence, the nouvelle vague auteurs moved away from the academic culture of the Cinéma de qualité. The Italian young intellectuals of the nuovo cinema movement cut loose from both the institutional cinema identified with the studios of Cinecittá and the political influence of the Christian-Democratic government on Italian culture. The realist Spanish film-makers of the nuevo cine movement opposed the ideological and aesthetic limitations of a censorship-ridden and politically structured film industry by resorting to film forms and aesthetic styles borrowed both from realist and Hollywood cinemas.
In each of the national film systems here considered, the film author as a sociology-of-production finds origin in systems of film production derived from government policies and state institutions for the promotion of culturally oriented film projects existing since before World War II and further implemented in the post-war period. In France, a fundamental establishment in this sense is the Institut de Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (I.D.H.E.C.), a national school for the professional training of film-makers, film technicians, and film actors, founded in 1943 by the film director Marcel l'Herbier and in a fascist context, under the Vichy government. The institution was 'rehabilitated' after the end of World War II, in conjunction with the opening of a private institution subsidized by the state, the Cinémathèque Française. In 1946 the French government created the Centre National de la Cinématographie (C.N.C.), in place of the Comité d'Organisation de l'Industrie Cinématographique (C.O.I.C.), established during the German occupation period to co-ordinate the French film industry. Since 1948 the C.N.C. has controlled the system of government film funds, the Compte de soutien, collected from a combination of tax receipts, bank supports, and state grants. Once the most immediate priorities of reconstructing the production and exhibition structures were met, the Compte de soutien focused more on subsidizing film projects. In 1959 and 1960 two forms of financing were introduced: the Soutien automatique, aimed at the film industry in general and based on box office receipts; and the Aide sélective, better known as avance sur recettes, based on the selective funding (20 per cent of films made) and privileging of culturally oriented films (Hayward 1993a: 46–47). In 1981 the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, promoted a significant increase in the advance funds, instituting also a financial company with the purpose of advancing capital to producers and film-makers, the Société de Financement des Industries Cinématographiques et Audiovisuelles (S.O.F.I.C.A., 'Society for the Financing of Cinema and the Audio-visual') (Hayward 1993b: 384). Unlike in Italy – where financial aids exerted a strong political and censorship supervision – in France state contributions to the film industry took more of a purely economic direction. This explains why in France the struggle for the control of film distribution has often allied the government with the film industry and has considered its worst enemy the new audio-visual apparatus per se and not, as in Italy, the political structure behind it. As René Prédal remarks, film authors in France would claim a sense of their artistic identity depending on the medium they would be working with, so that '[t]he filmmaker calls himself artist and treats the television director as an artisan. The first talks creation and the second profession, one expresses himself through film and the other impressed tape, the latter makes a living out of his work, while the other starves for his art' (Hennebelle and Prédal 1987: 15, my translation).
In France as much as in Italy, educational film institutions remained the main points of reference for film-makers seeking professional training. Yet many other venues were offered to aspiring film authors through unofficial channels of apprenticeship. First the film industry and later the television networks provided for the professional development of most emerging film-makers in the 1960s and 1970s. The Parisian-based tradition of cinéphilisme (cinephilia) and film criticism is largely responsible for the cultural shaping of French film authorship (de Baecque 2003). This scene, in turn, arguably was influenced by the cultural climate of post-World War II Parisian intelligentsia, most notably the figures of Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux (de Baecque 1991 and 1998).8 To be sure, French auteurism tried to disengage itself from these cultural links. However, as Antoine de Baecque notes, the Jeunes Turcs of Cahiers du Cinéma both betrayed and continued this critical tradition, embodied by the father figures of André Bazin and Jean Georges Auriol and hosted in the Revue du cinéma. If Truffaut and colleagues moved away from the literary style of the Revue du cinéma and eventually freed themselves from their Oedipal complexes, they nevertheless retained some of the critical approaches and perspectives of both, including their interest in literature and their use of film to explore contemporary reality (de Baecque 1991: 15–16). De Baecque (1991: 16) argues that insofar as the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma considered cinema at the level of any other art, their aesthetic agenda was very much in line with Bazin and Auriol's philosophical and critical positions. However, he also points out that
Because it was founded on a heritage, but at the same time took issue against it, Cahiers du cinéma, took upon itself the suspicions of betrayal, from the beginning. The 'fidelity' of its followers is constantly trapped in a reading where the syndrome of betrayal and the abandon of critical values fluctuate. (Ibid., my translation)
In other words, if the politique des auteurs succeeded in getting rid of the climate ofengagement that was pending in French art cinema and produced a new type of film discourse with the nouvelle vague, it certainly failed to expunge from other film critics of Cahiers du Cinéma and other film journals the commitment to a 'high cultural' literary tradition and to an idea of criticism as an expression of personal views and beliefs.
The figure of the film author in Italian cinema is linked to both professional training and intellectual education. These apparently antithetical lineages have a historical common foundation, institutionalized by the fascist regime during the 1930s reorganization of the Italian film industry. As mentioned earlier on, Italian film-makers and critics have long overlooked this genealogy for ideological reasons. Their interpretation of neo-realism came from an antifascist perspective that inspired many Italian film-makers to claim their derivation from neo-realism, down to the present generation of film-makers. Gian Piero Brunetta identifies the origin of this ideological lineage in neo-realism, also noting that 'neo-realist poetic [was] founded on the myth of spontaneity and immediacy and on the celebration of the Work and of the Author' (Brunetta 1998: 263, my translation). Brunetta inserts this comment in a chapter about post-World War II screenwriters, who, according to him, represented 'the production element removed from such poetics, in order to maintain its image of immediacy' (ibid., my translation). Especially since the 1970s, many historians have promoted a revisionist approach to neo-realism by underlining the continuity between the film authors and styles of the regime and those of the neo-realist renaissance. The descent of neo-realism from the 1940s vogue of realism in film and literature (both mediated by North American 'realist' literature and cinema as well as Soviet socialist cinema) and the former careers of neo-realist masters in the fascist film industry is fundamental for understanding one of the most distinctive traits in Italy's authorial film practices: the frequent combination of opposite aesthetics and ideologies. The peculiarity of Italian film authorship also derives from another tradition in the national film industry: the involvement of famous intellectuals and artists. Since the early 1910s, these figures brought an aura of cultural prestige to Italian cinema and contributed to the representation of European cinema as the homeland of art film.
The reorganization of the Italian film industry under the fascist regime institutionalized this national cultural heritage and put it at the service of a sophisticated strategy of popular appeal. This effort was evident in the fascist creation of film institutions, schools, and associations on the one hand and the diffusion of film culture through academic organizations and local associations on the other. The institutions that became centres of formation and discussion for film authors were the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and the Venice International Film Festival. Founded during the fascist regime, the two institutions were closed down during the war and both reopened in 1946. In the years immediately following the end of World War II, the institutionalization of the Centro Sperimentale followed the strategies of the vice-secretary to the Prime Minister specifically in charge of film policies, Giulio Andreotti. A skilled politician and one of the most powerful men of the Christian Democratic Party, in 1949 Andreotti promoted two laws that introduced a system of indirect yet close control and censorship on the Italian film industry. He also appointed Christian Democratic figures at the direction of film production and distribution companies, of the Centro Sperimentale, and of the Venice Film Festival (Brunetta 1998: 59–81). These two were points of cultural reference also after the fall of the fascist regime and the end of World War II. A professional school for film technicians, directors, screenwriters, and actors/actresses seeking direct contact with the national film industry, the Centro Sperimentale became an international centre of film formation. In the 1960s, the school attracted students coming from Latin America who brought their experience in the New Wave and counter film movements that were developing in that area. At the Centro Sperimentale were the headquarters of Bianco e Nero, a film journal that shaped generations of critics in Italy. Bianco e Nero began publishing again after World War II, in 1947, first directed by the intellectual Umberto Barbaro. Soon after Andreotti was appointed vice-secretary of the Prime Minister, Barbaro was dismissed and a new cultural trend began.
The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and the Venice Film Festival also took on a more pragmatic and mainstream direction. The Centro Sperimentale became a state institution, more oriented toward professionalism than artistic expression and experimentation. A fine intellectual, film teacher, and a film-maker himself, Francesco Pasinetti directed the Venice Film Festival from its reopening in 1946 until his premature death in 1949. Under the direction of a Christian Democratic board, the festival lost its cultural prestige and was often at the centre of polemics and critiques (Brunetta 1998: 58–59). For this reason, the school promoted what still remains as a unique typology of film author: a film-maker with a strong professional training, as well as intellectually versatile. The importance of the Centro Sperimentale faltered with the crisis of the film industry. Brunetta places the institutional decadence of the Centro Sperimentale even earlier, in the years immediately following World War II. According to Brunetta, the centrality of the film studios and cultural institutions in Rome was forever lost after the Liberation, in spite of – and probably because of – all state efforts to concentrate the entire audio-visual system in Rome. Brunetta views the consequences of this fragmentation in the creation of new centres for cultural film practices (Milan in particular). Many small and ephemeral film production companies were founded in the years following the end of World War II. Sometimes these companies were financed by local industrialists (as it was the case for the Industrie Cinematografiche e Teatrali (I.C.E.T.), established in 1946) or by film producers based in other cities than Rome (Brunetta 1998: 44–45).
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Excerpted from Beyond Auteurism by Rosanna Maule. Copyright © 2008 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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