Bordwell's Auteur Theory

Broadly speaking, auteur theory as Sarris saw it could be implemented for a new cannon formation and elevated Hollywood directors to the status of auteurs. He suggested that “film history is both films in history and the history of films.” He believed that is based on an awareness of the past and though films do represent their historical contexts, they must be judged “in the realm of now” with a “faith in film history as a continuing cultural activity.” Quite simply, “auteur theory is theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography.” Though there may be the exceptional great film, films should be looked at based on the wholeness of the artist and the work. For

With more freedom than Hollywood directors, the art film is meant to be read as “the work of an expressive individual.” This is much in line with Sarris’s notion that credits the auteur with overcoming “the gravitational pull of the mass of movies.” Without identifiable actors or genres, art cinema, like auteur analysis, causes the viewer to look for stylistic signatures in the narrative that are shaped by the authorial presence. Bordwell believes that “realism and authorial expressivity, then, will be the means whereby art film unifies itself.” Bordwell elaborates that the deviations from classical cinema are “resituated as realism (in life things happen this way) or authorial commentary (the ambiguity is symbolic).” The art film provides an enticing medium for the auteur’s vision as the film “reasserts that ambiguity is the dominance principle of

From one of the first scenes, when Michel kills the police officer, the hand-held camera creates an unsteady extreme close up of his gun, to a long shot of the cop falling, to a flash cut of Michel running across a field as the music surreptitiously comes on. The scene ranges from frontal close-ups that draw from inspiration from television compositions to highly stylized visual compositions to moments of natural realism reveal his efforts at hybridization. Godard showed a clear disregard for traditional narrative convention, as scenes the scene of Michel and Patricia in her bedroom illustrate a story where dialogue is meaningless, where language and action become intentionally banal and reveals the problematic character of language and his abstraction from a traditional literary framework. His use of jump cutting throughout the scene breaks up time and pacing and breaks from the rules of traditional continuity. Godard makes frequent reference to consumer items like Michel’s robbery of various American automobiles, paintings, and literature that reveal a self-reflexivity and belief of America’s colonization of French culture with its products, as well as a reflection of his belief that “no material is inherently