A certain tendency in French film
A certain tendency in French film (original title: Une certaine tendance du cinéma français ) is an article by the then film critic and later film director François Truffaut in the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma from the year 1954. In it Truffaut criticized the sedate French post-war cinema that he had with the the terms reevaluating label "tradition of quality" provided. The article is regarded as a pioneering manifesto for the new cinematic forms of expression of the Nouvelle Vague and as a basic text for the Politique des auteurs .
prehistory
Cahiers' editors polemicized against French film since the early 1950s . In 1951, for example, Frederic Laclos criticized the director Claude Autant-Lara for not getting involved in his subjects. Michel Dorsday condemned post-war cinema in 1952, saying it self-satisfied withdrew to technically perfect, ostensibly artistic and thematically backward-looking films. Out of his disappointment with French film, Truffaut had been working on a general settlement with the Kino der Zeit for several years. The editor-in-chief of the Cahiers André Bazin received a design from Truffaut in 1952. Bazin made suggestions for improvement and had the young critic write reviews of individual films in the Cahiers in order to give him writing practice.
The item
The number 31 of the Cahiers du cinéma from 1954 was planned from the start as a challenge to the established cinema. In addition to Truffaut's article, it contained a treatise by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze on the slippery and voyeuristic portrayal of women in French film. Doniol-Valcroze already pointed out in the foreword to the issue that the two attacks should serve both as a critical orientation point in the discourse and as a “common theoretical point of convergence” .
In his 14-page article, Truffaut first dealt with the film-historical classification of the topic he was looking at, the films of "psychological realism" of the 1940s and 1950s. Of the around 100 films produced annually in France, around ten to twelve are worth considering, namely the films by the most prestigious directors and scriptwriters, which are awarded prizes at film festivals. For him, these represented the "tradition of quality" . These films are mostly adaptations of literary works that are reworked for the film according to a scheme developed by the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost , the so-called "procedure of equivalence". This procedure dissects the literary source strictly cinematically according to "rotatable" and "non-rotatable" scenes. The result is a cynical attitude towards the submission and a exploitation of the issues. Using the example of the film Diary of a Country Pastor ( Journal d'un curé de campagne , 1950) by Robert Bresson with a script by Aurenche and Bost based on a novel by Georges Bernanos , Truffaut proves his claim. Due to the systematic redesign from a bourgeois standpoint, everything that is provocative and revolutionary about film is only "garnish" and only serves to "make the pants of the philistine shake" . The filmmakers' coldness towards their subjects and their arrogant attitude makes it impossible to identify with the characters. The overwhelming power of only about seven to eight screenwriters who work for the prestige films, and their always the same way of working, has created a monotony that alienates cineastes from cinema.
In the following, Truffaut demands the filmmaker's personal interest and personal responsibility for his work. First of all, this includes giving the director more control over the film. The scripts, on the other hand, should no longer be written by writers, but by filmmakers, since only they would show enough love for the medium. Truffaut points out the directors Jean Renoir , Robert Bresson , Jean Cocteau , Jacques Becker , Abel Gance , Max Ophüls , Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt as positive examples, all of whom produced outside the “tradition of quality” under difficult conditions. Truffaut denies the possibility that both types of filmmaking could co-exist: "Well, I can not believe in a peaceful coexistence of the 'tradition of quality' and a cinema of authors ."
Effect and classification
The article was received very controversially immediately after its publication. While the older film critics reacted cautiously to outraged, the younger generation of film critics enthusiastically accepted Truffaut's approach. Claude Mauriac , film critic at Figaro , praised the article as a long overdue reckoning with the slowness of post-war cinema. The two scolded scriptwriters and some directors appeared at the monthly regulars' table of the French filmmakers and discussed Truffaut's theses with the film critics in a heated and controversial manner. The Cahiers received a large number of letters to the editor criticizing the article's polemics. In issue no. 32, Bazin found himself forced to smooth things over and soften Truffaut's aggressive tone; In an editorial he tried to take the polemics out of the discussion.
Jacques Laurent of the weekly Arts newspaper became aware of Truffaut through the broad discussion and made him responsible for the film side. The young critic has now written for Arts for five years with great success, where he repeated and deepened his critical approach.
With his article and the discussion about him, Truffaut achieved that the young film critics of the Cahiers were noticed by a broad public for the first time. He then continued his argument with unrelenting polemics and created the first basis for the theoretical formulation of the Politique des auteurs , in which his colleagues such as Rivette , Godard , and Chabrol participated intensively. The profile they gained in this way enabled them to be able to make films themselves for the first time in the early 1960s that were based on Truffaut's new approach and went down in film history under the name Nouvelle Vague . Truffaut's assessments had a lasting influence on the opinion of film scholars: while many works by the filmmakers he praised were canonized, a large part of the criticized French post-war cinema was forgotten.
literature
Truffaut's article in German translation
- François Truffaut: There is a certain tendency in French film. In: Theodor Kotulla (ed.): The film. Manifestos, documents, talks . Volume 2: 1945 to today. Piper Verlag, Munich 1964, pp. 116-131.
- François Truffaut: There is a certain tendency in French film. In: François Truffaut: The pleasure of seeing. Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-88661-215-5 , pp. 295-313 ( film library ).
Secondary literature
- Simon Frisch: Myth Nouvelle Vague. How cinema was reinvented in France. Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-89472-534-1 , pp. 63-87 (also: Hildesheim, Univ., Diss., 2005).
- Emilie Bickerton: A Brief History of the Cahiers du cinéma . diaphanes, Zurich et al. 2010, ISBN 978-3-03734-126-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ quoted in: Simon Frisch: Myth Nouvelle Vague - How the cinema was reinvented in France. Schüren Verlag Marburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-89472-534-1 . P. 73. All quotations in the German translation by Simon Frisch
- ↑ quoted in: Frisch: p. 67
- ↑ quoted in: Frisch: p. 69
- ↑ quoted in: Frisch: p. 71