Book: The Cult of the Author by Geneviève Sellier, a posture of authority

The phenomenon of sexist and sexual violence within Art-house cinema must be taken seriously, including in the analyzes that are made of it. In addition to the press articles at the origin of these revelations, books of testimony appear, such as, recently, those of Caroline Ducey or Isild Le Besco. But no work, until now, has considered the question as a whole. This is why we could wait a lot from the essay by Geneviève Sellier, professor emeritus in film studies.

Its title indicates without ambiguity what will be the cardinal explanation of what Geneviève Sellier describes as “deviations of French cinema” : The Cult of the Author. But even before describing the modalities of this “cult”, the first pages deny in cinema the fact of attributing a film to a single author – a standard imposed, says the author, since the New Wave –, on the pretext that it requires “multiple artistic and technical collaborations” and costs “sums that an individual, even if he or she is rich, is incapable of raising”.

Going further, Sellier believes that the “politics of authors”, dear to Cinema notebooks of the 1950s (where Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Godard wrote), is a “deception”.

These few lines combine short-sightedness and argument from authority (a word sharing the same etymology with “author”). Short view: as if in cinema there was no designer-initiator of a project and no organizer in its realization. Argument from authority, because Geneviève Sellier sticks to this qualifier of “deception” without further ado, taking care not to provide the history of the notion of “authors’ politics” and to retrace the legitimation fight of the 7^e art that the editors of Notebooks led then.

Pamphlet

It is therefore necessary to take The Cult of the Author for what it is: not an analytical essay but a pamphlet, with its a prioriits sophisms and its caricatures. And the designation of an original sin: the New Wave, which gave auteur cinema, mainly male, and the belief in the genius of the “demiurge” who authorizes himself everything, with the complicity cinephilic institutions, including criticism, the object of such powerful hatred on the part of Sellier that resentment cannot be entirely foreign to it.

In the bad game of “the end justifies the means”, Sellier undermines his cause.

Whether gender and class criteria should be integrated into the way we look at films is not a debate. That a sexist dimension, long neglected it is true, exists in certain New Wave films can no longer be kept quiet (to be discussed). But why stoop to insult by speaking, for example, of a “ ‘herd’ of actresses » that Rohmer would have regularly renewed?

More seriously (?), Geneviève Sellier sees in auteur cinema an evacuation of the social in favor of a petty bourgeois inter-self preoccupied with romantic relationships, with, in addition, “actors who give the impression of not acting (sic)”. She lists directors and chooses one of their films for exegesis… which corresponds exactly to the necrotic definition that it gives auteur cinema. Blessed method! In addition to ignoring the films of filmmakers that she cites (Amalric, Mouret, Ozon, etc.) in contradiction with her remarks, she excludes a large part of today’s auteur cinema without any justification.

Where have Guiraudie, Ameur-Zaïmèche, Guédiguian, Ladj Ly or Campillo gone, to name but a few, who are the polar opposites of his fallacious demonstration? And when she devotes a chapter to female directors, she launches into a distinction byzantine between the cinema of authors, which they practice, and the cinema of auteur, to which they would not have access, unless they submit to the“dominant model”. Always according to presuppositions which favor his settling of scores.

In the bad game of “the end justifies the means”, Sellier undermines his cause. His book is also crossed by this rancid antiphon according to which auteur cinema, benefiting from the public aid system, would care less about making admissions. Where do we locate Poujadism in politics?

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