Order Description
Thomas Elsaesser notes that the ‘politique des auteurs’ developed by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics in the 1950s had an number of core theses, notably that ‘the quality of a film is determined not by its subject matter, but by its style’ and that ‘the style does not come from the script, the studio, the producer or the actors: it comes from the director’. He describes this early auteur theory as ‘a revelation and a revolution’ (1995). Outline in approximately 500 words what was revolutionary about ‘la politique des auteurs’, and using examples of the work of one director studied this semester (Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Krzysztof Kieslowski) show what Truffaut and his peers understood by ‘style’ (1000 words). Harvard referencing with page numbers and references to films by Krzysztof Kieslowski (‘A short film about killing’ and ‘A short film about love’