The Bressonians: French Cinema and the Culture of Authorship. By Codruţa Morari

Abstract

Why has the notion of a film author ‘become so central to our thinking about cinema and yet remained so fraught?’, asks Codruţa Morari in this new study of auteurism (p. 1). As she notes, the idea of the director as author was consecrated by the ‘politique des auteurs’ promoted by François Truffaut and other contributors to the Cahiers du cinéma in the mid-1950s. Truffaut’s celebration of the director’s unique, personal vision, made evident in particular through the mise en scène, has since been critiqued for reproducing a ‘romantic cult of personality’ (p. 7) and overlooking the collective dimensions of film production, distribution, and exhibition. Yet, as Morari argues, the concept of the auteur ‘remains an inordinately resilient category’ (p. 2), a locus of persistent critical investment that she addresses deconstructively by focusing on Robert Bresson, a filmmaker who would appear to exemplify an auteurist singularity of vision. Rejecting...