"What's at the movies?" asks a Yale junior vacationing in Manhattan.
"Well," replies his date for the evening, "there's the Godard, an old Fellini, the new Truffau'—"How about something without subtitles for a change? 2001. Or The Midnight Cowboy. Or the Alan Arkin picture . . ."
Such dialogue—this one occurred last week—reflects the state of the contemporary film. In the U.S., movies are known by their titles or their stars. Overseas, the director is becoming the star. There may always be the Catherine Deneuves and Marcello Mastroiannis who are billed above the titles of their films. But increasingly the actor in Europe has become less important than the man who calls the shots. When France's Jean-Luc Godard makes a film, the title is virtually irrelevant. Satyricon is the official name of a forthcoming fantasy about the sexual excesses of ancient Rome, but the knowing audience may be attracted more by the movie's unofficial title: "The New Fellini." Such Italian directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica are also, in effect, the titles of their films, as are Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman and celebrated French Film Makers François Truffaut and Alain Resnais (La Guerre Est Finie).
French Origins. It was not always so. The general public has long regarded movies as entertainment, not literature. Great and powerful films arrived as unpredictably as meteors and were gone before they could be measured. The rest was forgettable glitter.
The doctrine that lifted directors to their new eminence first appeared in the pages of the resolutely avant-garde French magazine Cahiers du Cinema. In January 1954, Truffaut, then a critic and aspiring film maker, wrote a prophetic article entitled "Politique des Auteurs" ("The Mark of the Author"). Its purpose: to show that celluloid could be just as prestigious as paper. Movies were not group art, he argued. The scenario, camera work and acting were all under the unifying force of the director —the author of a body of film work.
The theory soon gathered support on both sides of the screen. Suddenly the films of Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles could be spoken of as works with strands of philosophy running through them, like the plays of Racine. Republic Pictures' westerns and Warner Brothers' gangster films from the '40s were reappraised as examples of directorial brilliance.
Despite its persuasive power, the auteur theory suffered from one serious flaw. Though the Cahiers critics had an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, they understood little of the Hollywood System. From the '30s onward, American directors have often been mere foremen, called in for the job after the laborers —including the actors—were hired by the studio. Some, like John Huston, are capable of severe impressive films (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of Sierra Madre). Others are erratic job-by-job film makers whose unifying philosophy seems to be a healthy respect for the box-office receipts.