The Age of Auteurs — The New Cinema Revolution

In the previous episode, we watched Hollywood’s studio system reach its twilight through the spread of television and the Paramount decision, and counterattack with the giant-screen cult of the blockbuster. The chains of the stable empire had loosened, and through the gaps a new wind was beginning to blow in.

That wind blew first not from America but from France. Young men who had never shot a film — critics by trade — dashed out into the streets with light cameras in hand. While praising the great works of the past, they at the same time set out to smash, one after another, the conventional wisdom of old-fashioned filmmaking.

The director is the true author of a work — this idea, which at first glance seems obvious, would shake the cinema of the world to its foundations in the 1960s and 70s. This episode is the story of a rare age in which criticism changed the movies.

The Camera as Fountain Pen — The Birth of the Nouvelle Vague

The story’s point of ignition lies in a single film-criticism magazine: ‘Cahiers du Cinéma.’ Around this journal, presided over by the film critic André Bazin and others, gathered young men possessed by cinema. Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol — the figures who would later be called the ‘Cahiers group.’

They began first by writing. They sharply criticized the rigid ‘tradition of quality’ of old French cinema, and on the other hand sought out, within Hollywood’s entertainment films, masterpieces engraved with the director’s individuality. As one source of this thinking, Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 essay ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo’ is often cited. Just as an author writes prose with a pen, the director should write films with the camera — that was the idea.

And so they traded the pen for the camera. They set out to prove in their own work what they had preached in criticism.

In 1959, Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’ and Chabrol’s ‘Les Cousins’ came into the world. Godard’s ‘Breathless,’ released the following year in 1960, is said to have overturned the very grammar of cinema with its careless jump cuts and improvised street shooting. The fever these works gave off did not stop within France alone.

That said, the movement was not monolithic. Godard and Truffaut, once comrades, would later part ways. While Godard went on pursuing auteurism in a more fundamental and experimental vein, Truffaut is judged to have eventually steered toward a narrative quality that reached the masses. Even within the revolution, there were several roads.

When the Director Becomes the Lead — The Idea of Auteurism

The greatest legacy the Nouvelle Vague cast upon the world may have been a single theory: ‘auteurism’ (the auteur theory).

Until then, film was collective work involving many hands, and was hard to call any single person’s creation. The studio planned it, the star was the marquee, the screenwriter wrote the plot. The view that the director was merely one worker in that process ran deep.

The Cahiers group raised an objection to this. In a fine film there is a consistent individuality running through every corner of the screen — the stamp of an author. And that author, they said, is none other than the director. Even a piece of entertainment shot on order from a studio is, if the director’s own themes and style flow through it, a proper work of an ‘auteur.’

This idea crossed the ocean and exerted a great influence on young American film people and critics. In the late 1960s, the ‘new wave’ films arising in various parts of the world were introduced to America through up-and-coming distribution companies and absorbed, as if devoured, by the young people studying at film schools. Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Truffaut, as well as Japan’s Akira Kurosawa — the works of auteurs across national borders became the textbooks of the next generation.

This view, placing the director at the center of a work, would in time become the driving force that remade American cinema itself.

The New Cinema — The Few Years Hollywood Grew Young

The stage shifts to America. As we saw in the previous episode, the studio system had weakened, audiences had drifted away, and the old cult of the blockbuster, too, was showing signs of a dead end. The old executives struggled to grasp what young people wanted to watch. Into that void, new talent flowed.

What is regarded as the turning point is 1967’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘The Graduate,’ and 1969’s ‘Easy Rider.’ Although no one had at first predicted a major hit for these works, they drew the fanatical support of young audiences. They depicted violence and sex without hesitation, were skeptical of authority, and faced the contradictions of society head-on — such attitudes resonated with the mood of an era shaken by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.

This whole surge is called the ‘New American Cinema,’ or ‘New Hollywood,’ the ‘Hollywood Renaissance,’ and the like. It is the era of American cinema’s rejuvenation, lasting roughly from the late 1960s through the 70s.

In this era, the director was treated not as a mere craftsman but as an ‘auteur’ who engraved his own themes and worldview. The studios entrusted young talent with a discretion greater than ever before. Dark endings, ambiguous protagonists, experimental structures — all were permitted. The audience, for its part, sought not easy tales of good triumphing over evil but stories that reflected a reality that could not be neatly resolved. A rare few years in which the filmmaker’s individuality came forward over the logic of commerce.

What the Revolution Left Behind

From the Nouvelle Vague to the New American Cinema — the cinema of the 1960s into the 70s was run through by a single conviction: that film, before it is a product, can be someone’s expression. A movement that began from the words of criticism came to fruition, in visible form, upon screens all over the world.

Of course, one cannot idealize this era too much. The freedom of the auteur did not always produce masterpieces, and there were works judged to have fallen into obscurity or self-indulgence. There are also accounts told in later years of cases where vast production costs were poured out in the name of the auteur and stumbled badly at the box office. Where the light is strong, the shadow too is deep.

Even so, what this revolution left to cinema is great. A sensibility that regards the director as the author of a work, a way of shooting that does not fear the texture of reality, a maturity that permits stories which cannot be neatly resolved — these live on in the undercurrent of world cinema even as the times change. From the day the young critics turned their cameras on the street corners of Paris, cinema had indeed, by one step, grown up.

But the age of freedom the auteurs had opened up did not last long. Before long, the tale of a single shark and a galaxy far, far away would push cinema back toward a colossal entertainment industry, greater than ever before. The screen was about to meet its next great surge.