By GARETH HARDING, Wall Street Journal
January 4, 2008
The filmmaker as “author,” or dominant creative force behind a movie, was first described in a famous 1954 magazine article by François Truffaut, who drew a distinction between directors like Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, who sought to “bring something genuinely personal” to their films, and the hack-for-hire directors who had predominated under the Hollywood studio system.
Since then, every decade has had its dominant European filmmakers — from Truffaut himself, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Milos Forman in the 1960s and ’70s to Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pedro Almodóvar, Lars Von Trier, Ken Loach and Emir Kusturica in the ’80s and ’90s. These directors were known for highbrow, meticulously made, and sometimes difficult- to-watch movies that made personal, political or artistic statements.
But many critics now say European cinema is in a kind of identity crisis as it attempts to compete against mega-budget Hollywood movies — not to mention the steady supply of art-house or “indie” films from across the Atlantic — while remaining faithful to its tradition of low-budget (and often government-subsidized) auteurship. Some even argue that the age of the visionary, all-powerful writer/director — personified by the likes of Bergman and Truffaut — is over. “The concept of the ‘film d’auteur’ is nearly dead,” says Dominique Jahn, a movie producer and director of the Brussels film festival, an annual event that emphasizes small, art-house productions. “In Europe, directors are becoming less important and producers more so; while in America, star actors are the bosses.”
Don’t tell that to 24-year-old Swiss director and actor Barthélemy Grossmann, who recently won strong reviews for his debut feature, a thriller called “13m2.”
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