Camera-Stylo & Auteur/Metteur-en-Scene

La Caméra-Stylo

• It translates to "camera-pen"
• Alexandre Astruc argues cinema has matured enough to detect a new "avant-garde"
• Filmmaking is a pure means of expression, like painting and novels
• The film camera is equivalent to a novelist's pen
• The "camera-pen" allows an artist/author to express their thoughts, feelings, and ideas onscreen
• The "author" wielding the "camera-pen" is the DIRECTOR

Auteur/Metteur-en-Scene

• Six years later, Francois Truffaut wrote an essay for Cahiers du cinema called, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”
• Truffaut criticized current trends in French cinema, specifically the "Tradition of Quality"
• Truffaut saw these films as transcriptions of screenplays, which were copies of novels
• The director was reduced to a translator of what the screenwriter wrote
• The director's aesthetic contributions were overlooked as well
• Film critics used theatre/literature terms to judge films, overlooking the act of filming itself
• Truffaut felt critics and studios failed to appreciate what film can do
• Mise-en-scene refers to elements film borrows from theatre
• Mise-en-scene (with cinematography) is the director's responsibility
• The production stage is where the film takes shape to reflect the director's personality
• The director's influence is felt through mise-en-scene
• Inspired by American filmmakers (Welles, Hitchcock, Ford), French film critics called these filmmakers "auteurs"
• Auteurs put their personal stamp on the films by staging action for the camera
• The "auteur theory" insists that certain directors attain a true "author" status
• A true "author" imposes subjective control to filmmaking, especially mise-en-scene
• Auteur theory equates a film director with a novel author
• Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut argued not every director is an auteur
• A director needs to show a common style and thematic concern across their filmography to be an auteur
• Auteurs retain control over the filmmaking Process
• Francis Ford Coppola says the director is "the last remaining dictatorial position in the democratic world”
• Filmmakers not considered auteurs are labeled as "metteurs-en-scene"
• "Metteurs-en-scene" are transmitters of the story without personal style
• "Metteurs-en-scene" are competent directors who work "for-hire"
• Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee & Kathryn Bigelow are all auteurs

Methodological Theories

• Cinema represents an unprecedented social power to influence audience attitudes/perceptions
• Rather than ask "Is cinema art?" theorists ask "Why is cinema such a socially influential medium?"
• Early concerns that cinema represented an escalation in mass media/social influence
• Cinema offered a spectacle that enraptured audiences and changed how they saw the world
• After World War II, the study of cinema intensified to understand the rise of fascism/Nazism
• Researchers studied cinema's social impact and its effectiveness as propaganda, specifically Nazi propaganda
• What is cinema? is a question that shifted to How is cinema able to sway audiences? for example
• Methodological Theories of Film involved academics studying film, legitimizing cinema studies as a field
• University researchers were interested in why cinema demonstrated social powers of persuasion
• This recognized cinema as a worthy social fact and led to the formation of film departments

Christian Metz

• Christian Metz sought to apply linguistic concepts to cinema to gauge its similarity to language
• Film is "difficult to explain because it is easy to understand"
• Metz wanted to make sense of cinema as language
• Is cinema a language? Metz would say: "Yes and No"

Why "Yes"? Why does he think that cinema is a language?

• Cinema is a language because it's a constructed commentary/representation of the world
• There is a "speaker" (filmmakers) and "listeners" (film audience)
• Cinema combines shots into meaningful arrangements
• This is like language entails the combination of words into sections

Language Applied to Cinema

• Like language, cinema has a Syntagmatic Axis
• Shots are combined/arranged into sequences
• Sequences communicate meaning
• Meaning is produced through shot juxtapositions
• A shot's meaning is determined by its placement in a sequence
• What precedes/follows a shot influences viewer experience/interpretation

Why does he say that cinema is not a language?

• Metz was a trained linguist
• Cinema does not have some Language features
• Cinema is more unruly than language itself
• Language is more structured and systemic than Cinema
• Fictional narrative cinema can be studied like language BECAUSE narrative, experimental, and advertisement do not have continuity
• Cinema may remind us of language's syntagmatic axis but cinema does have a Paradignmatic Axis
• Cinema has no equivalent to a fixed pool of words
• A director deciding on a shot isn't the same as picking a word for a sentence
• When composing a shot, you're inventing, not selecting
• Metz countered that film shots are always CREATIVE and CREATED in the moment
• "In the cinema the number of images if indefinite
• "To speak a language is to use it, but to "speak cinematographic language is to invert it
• "Speakers of ordinary language are USERS. Filmmakers are CREATORS"

Denotation

• Refers to the narrative information contained within a film shot (the literalness of the plot)

Connotation

• Refers to the cinematic style (mise-en-scene, cinematography)

• Framing, camera movements, lighting

• Denotation tends to be more objective in its meanings

• Denotation refers to plot meanings which all conventional viewers must know

• Connotation tends to be more subjective in its meanings of the shot

Renaissance/Linear Perspective

• Renaissance perspective contrasts the diversity of perspectives provided by the stage
• The former is "centered" and features "linear perspective"
• Creates the "illusion of space and distance on a flat surface" through a fixed vanishing point
• The experience of the stage is "de-centered" and multi-perspectival, with many visual access points not simply one
• Films cultivate a singular spectatorial experience
• Films construct an individualized viewpoint by the camera (typically centered and linear) which steers viewers on film
• Mainstream Cinema directs our looks in a certain way
• When we watch films each of us is a spectator positioned to experience the films form a singular -perspective
• The focus was on the spectator's mind and how our perspective on the film is directed, channeled, and imposed by the film itself
• The main academic field is psychology, but specifically psychoanalysis

Laura Mulvey/Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema

• Laura Mulvey wrote the most famous/influential essay in film studies
• Her concept of the male gaze probably surpasses the auteur theory's application across study art and culture

Mulvey's essay weaved together the following topics and events

• Saussurean Semiotics
• Lacanian Psychoanalysis
• Louis Althusser's view on "ideology" (especially "interpellation")
• The women's rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s

More Key Points of Mulvey's essay

• Key point: the question of representation in media
• How women are depicted in media matters and has real-world implications
• Patriarchy saturates areas of life
• All areas of life need to be subject to struggles for gender equality
• Culture matters to challenge deep-seated gender inequities and stereotypes
• Most mainstream cinema features a male protagonist
• There was a lack of paid attention to gender in commercial narrative films
• Women are often positioned as objects for men's desires
• According to Lacan women are often caught in a trap between meaning EVERYTHING and being NOT ALL
• Mulvey felt that these psychoanalytic concepts could be used to understand this problem
• Mulvey's article has been described as a manifesto
• Classical Hollywood Narrative displays the following pattern:

Spectator Positioning

• The spectator is positioned by film to IDENTIFY with the male hero where our perspective is fused with his which we cannot avoid
• The spectator is positioned to GAZE at the woman character as a SPECTACLE
• Pleasure of this view is scopohilic
• Women in film are assigned the domain of spectacle, while men are assigned the domain of narrative.
• All Spectators were thought to turn straight b/c of this
• Only way to avoid this is to close your eyes or walk out of the theater

Clear Power Dynamic

• A female character is presented as/an object
• The narrative space is controlled by male character
• The female character is thus made an object
• Even as the female character was marginalized
• Her threat is to the perspective of the masculine
• The human subject is afraid of the difference of the genders

Classical Hollywood Narratives use a pattern to contain threat in feminine characters

Patterns include:

• Sadism is when the female is punished/killed or imprisoned
• Fetishism Includes the Classical Hollywood tendency to elevate women, for example, in Films like film noir
• Women have the tendency to be treated as dangerous and "punished" through "fetishism"

Charles Ramirez Berg

• To ensure bearing in film, The question of stereotyping will always come up
• Stereotypes are different from cognitive typification with traits:
• Stereotypes are not value-neutral
• Has traits with judgements that are negative
• Is a value Laden
• Stereotypes are an extension of Ethnocentrism
• One is an observer typically who unconsciously uses stereotypes by their own group

Conclusion

• Then is a value-laden process as for superiority
• Used from the outside
• This concept studies the representation of Linos and Latinas in history of films
• Determined that the first one is to determine clearly what "positive" and "negative really means
• Inability to determine to represent whether it is a positive, since if we have a film form and outside our own culture then we seem to be shown, from behavioural tick
• "Negative" traits may be comedies in the outside which seems ignorant