Key terms - Film 202 - International Art Cinema

La Révue du cinéma

A journal that championed Orson Welles, William Wyler, and other American directors - written by Roger Leenhardt and Andre Bazin who are critics that claimed that the director was the main source of a film’s value

Cahiers du cinéma

French monthly film magazine (its name means "Cinema Notebooks") founded in 1951 by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze

André Bazin quickly became its central critic - young critics like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, used it as a platform to aggressively promote the politique des auteurs (the "auteur policy")

reviewing films as the work of a director-author and attacking the established French "Cinema of Quality”

André Bazin

French film critic and theorist - central critic and co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma

Foundational figure in auteurism, arguing that the director was the primary creative source ("author") of a film

Developed influential realist film theory, praising techniques like deep focus and long takes that preserved spatial and temporal unity

François Truffaut

French film director and one of the young, provocative critics at Cahiers du cinéma.

Wrote the seminal, scandalous essay "A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema," which attacked the script-driven, literary "Tradition of Quality" in French film

Argued instead for a "cinema of auteurs"—directors like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson who wrote or controlled their scripts and expressed a personal vision, true "men of the cinema."

Alexandre Astruc

French film director and critic

Coined the concept of la caméra-stylo ("the camera-pen")

Argued that cinema had matured into a medium for personal artistic expression, where a filmmaker could use the camera as personally and freely as a writer uses a pen to convey ideas and feelings

le caméra-stylo

“the camera-pen" by Alexandre Astruc

Proposed that cinema had become a language for artistic expression, allowing the filmmaker to "write" directly with the camera, using cinematic tools as personally as an author uses a pen

This idea became a theoretical cornerstone for the auteur theory.

"A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema"

Provocative, manifesto-like 1954 essay by François Truffaut in Cahiers du cinéma

It launched a fierce attack on the dominant French "Cinema of Quality," which he dismissed as "scenarists' films"—unoriginal, literary adaptations where the director was merely a hired "stager" (metteur en scène)

The essay instead championed directors who were true auteurs, personally shaping their scripts and their films' style.

"auteur theory"

Term popularized in the early 1960s by American film critic Andrew Sarris to translate and explain the French politique des auteurs

Critical framework for evaluating films by treating the director as the primary "author," whose personal vision, consistent themes, and distinctive style are stamped on their body of work, even within a collaborative industrial system like Hollywood.

Andrew Sarris

American film critic who, in the early 1960s, introduced and championed the "auteur theory" to Anglo-American audiences

Applied this French critical method to re-evaluate the artistic merit of Hollywood directors, arguing that their personal artistic signatures could be discerned across their films.

Ingmar Bergman

Swedish film and theater director, considered a quintessential post-war art cinema auteur

His films are autobiographical, pouring his dreams, memories, guilt, and fantasies into psychologically probing dramas

Known for themes of existential crisis, marital strife, loss of faith, and the redemptive power of art, his personal vision and uncompromising artistic integrity helped define the art cinema

Stylistically, he is renowned for extreme close-ups and chamber-drama intimacy

Robert Bresson

French film director known for an highly distinctive style and a small, revered body of work

Rigorously distinguished his ideal of "cinematography" (writing through cinema) from mere "cinema" (which he saw as just photographed theater)

Used non-professional "models," fragmented framing, elliptical narratives, and a profound, precise use of sound to create enigmatic, spiritually charged films that focus on characters undergoing intense psychological ordeals

Realism

Principle of narrative motivation in art cinema; psycholoigcally complex characters who lack clear goals

conception of this affects a film’s spatial and temporal construction but the art cinema’ thing of this encompases a spectrum of possibilities

The means whereby the art film unifies itself, alongside authorial expressivity

“in life things happen this way”

Experiments in form exist

location shooting (objective realism) and character subjectivity (psychological realism)

Authorship

Film presented as the expression of a director (the “auteur”)

Viewer is trained to look for the director’s stylistic signautures, recurring themes, and personal vision

Deviations from classical norm aren’t mistakes but rather “authorial commentary”

Ambiguity

Realism and authorship often clash (an intrusive authorial style can break realistic illusion). Art cinema solves this through calculated this.

"When in doubt, read for maximum ___" This leads to famous open endings (freeze frames, unresolved stories) that ask the viewer to keep thinking

Ideally, the film hesitates, suggesting character subjectivity, life’s untidiness, and author’s vision...

"Given the film’s episodic structure and the minimization of character goals, the story will often lack a clear-cut resolution... With the open and arbitrary ending, the art film reasserts that ____ is the dominant principle of intelligibility..."