A mid-1950s change: the director read as author

Plenty of people who care about film have heard of auteur cinema, the notes begin, and know some of the names attached to it; fewer, they suspect, could say exactly what the phrase means. A way of looking at films through the “author,” they write, appeared in the mid-1950s.

Unlike a novel or a painting, a film is made by people from many trades. To treat the director, inside that collaborative system, as the maker of the finished work — the author — was, they say, a new way of watching. Today it is ordinary to wonder what the director intended; then, the director was thought less important than the producer, the star actor, or the star writer, and that question felt unfamiliar.

Colour, television, and young critics in a France not ten years past the war

By the 1950s, the notes write, film was just past fifty years old; feature fiction had been dominant for about thirty, sound for nearly twenty; colour was becoming the rule, and as television spread, audiences shrank and anxiety in the trade rose. In France, less than ten years after the war, official policies were being prepared to support domestic films against an American push.

It was then, they go on, that young French critics began to argue for a new way of judging films: putting the director at the centre, on the premise that the director’s work had a decisive effect on the film itself. That attitude, they add, was also what a director was expected to hold, and only director-centred production, those critics hoped, would save French cinema. Among them, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard later debuted as directors. In a commercial studio system, the notes write, a director had been thought to have little room: a floor director who used set techniques well and managed the crew.

Shooting in the street, long takes, and a plot that loosens

Auteur directors, the notes write, challenged Hollywood habit. Instead of studio sets, star actors, and artificial light, they shot in the street with synchronized sound. The habit, they say, took influence from the Italian neorealist tradition and from Bazin’s realism. Youthful transgression and revolt were carried in improvised direction, interviews, intertitles, and a block structure. Handheld camera, long takes, pans and tracks were used often, to keep attention on the surroundings. Distancing left the audience to judge, and to fill gaps the frame does not show. Causal links loosened; the purpose and motive of an action were not always clear.

The notes close by saying that auteur theory is an important way of reading a film, but that it has limits and should be held with a critical eye, and they point to studies of its critical reception and of its commercial uptake, including in Korean cinema, without naming further titles here.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student account of auteur cinema and the Nouvelle Vague: a mid-1950s French reading of the director as author, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, street shooting and long takes, and a reminder to keep a critical eye.

Last updated: 15 November 2026