The assumption that modern youth is truculent and lacking in respect for "elders and betters" rarely survives a visit to a college or, in my most recent experience, a lyc?e. The wary modernisation of French education has not, yet, led to banishing philosophy from the curriculum in terminal (the last year before the bac), even if the Gallic notion of the subject rarely embraces such jejune ideas as respect for the truth; but it has made room for film-making as an ancillary "discipline." Seduced from my Perigordine desk on a Wednesday morning in order to "redonner un peu ? la France," I was faced by four rows of rather solemn young persons in one of the four remodelled mini-cin?s of the Cinema Rex, Sarlat.
Since the boys and girls had just been primed with one of my antique films, in which Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn spoke slickly dubbed French, I expected a modernist assault on dated bourgeois values, 'Ollywood and Anglo-Saxon cultural domination. Indeed, I rather depended on it: although I have spent a good deal of time in France during the last 25 years, I had no confidence in my ability to maintain a two hour monologue. I advised my audience that I relied on their scornful impatience to give me pause and cause to counter-punch at didactic length. Fat chance.
I sought to provoke them by saying that, if French films were often of exceptional merit, the influence of French film criticism had been disastrous. Truffaut and Chabrol allowed misconceived reverence for Hitchcock (who made ten rotten movies for every good one) to hobble their own talents with homage. Les Cahiers du Cin?ma-the mag with which they, like Jean-Luc Godard, were associated before they could complete their spiteful eviction of the old guard of Cocteau, et al-had, in its sponsorship of the "auteur theory," uncorked a genie of durable malignity. The fact that a few directors can claim to be the authors of their films-Welles, Chaplin, Woody Allen, Antonioni, Eric Rohmer (alas)-in no way entails that directors are, by definition, authors.
Truffaut's best-and thoroughly practical-dictum was that making movies was a business of pointing the camera at beautiful women; this old rule is known in Hollywood as "staying with the money." Patrice Leconte's new movie, Ridicule, points its lens very wisely, very often, at Fanny Ardant-who mothered Truffaut's child-as well as at the pulpeuse Judith Godr?che. However, the film makes the mistake-as does the award-winning, disappointing Gazon Maudit-of a last scene with no women and two men in it.
The falsity of the auteur theory was established, I suggested, by the fact that no French intellectual would ever advance an idea because he thought it was true. Wasn't the only plausible reason for Parisian smarties to assert that directors were auteurs that the claim was paradoxical? Still my audience would not be goaded to chauvinist fury.
I trailed another coat. Jean Jacques Rousseau, I now expected them to remember, had become famous because, in an essay competition, he flew in the face of what he expected the majority of the candidates to write on the subject of the sciences and the arts. Since he was sure that the guileless goody-goodies would praise these secular deities, J-J nobly savaged them as corrupting influences. His heterodoxy won the prize and initiated a new brand of doxy.
Rousseau's success set a lasting trend which elevated being brilliantly perverse above being drably correct. "Pourquoi," Sartre once said to Raymond Aron, "as-tu si peur de d?conner?" Aron's mature-all-too-mature dread of making a fool of himself left Sartre the philosophical arbiter of the Left Bank (and the spiritual father of Pol Pot).
Truffaut's opinionated craftiness rendered him hardly less papal in the movies. But to their eternal shame, the Cahiers "authors" did everything they could to humiliate Michelangelo Antonioni at Cannes in 1960 when L'Avventura, the greatest postwar film, was hissed by the Marxist in-crowd. I had braced myself for some hissing from the young, but they clapped politely. There are all sorts of ways of being humiliated.
u u u
back at the ranch, I found in the mail a circular from the Directors Guild of Great Britain, inviting me to an "important meeting" on the subject of, yes, "Directors as Authors." Directors' authorial rights having finally been "achieved" (you can see why they sometimes need writers, can't you?); the problem remained to make sure that directors do not "lose out" (ah, elegance!) financially (ah, art!). The occasion was to be chaired by Clive Donner, who directed-or should it be "authored?"-two films which I wrote. Unable to leave the grass uncut long enough to attend the meeting, I had to rely on Clive to remind his peers that authors are authors, too.
Come to think of it, authorship is spreading in all directions. Novelists now write grovelling forewords in which they acknowledge the shaping spirit of their stalwart agents and infallible editors. Few writers seem able to put down a word these days without their back-up team's goosing advice and flapping towels. The author is dead? Then long live directors, editors, television executives and Concorde-borne agents, people who really know how to auth and not lose out financially.
