The director is dead: TV and the New Auteur

The cover of the current issue of Cahiers du Cinema features the decidedly glamourous but troubled character of Betty from US TV series MadMen. Inside the cover stands a Contents page listing a plethora of articles profiling other highly regarded serial shows - Breaking Bad, The Wire, ??

Surely I am not the only one for whom the radical significance of this issue is glaringly apparent…?

Cahiers du Cinema is not just a film journal. Cahiers is not just another publication about cinema. Cahiersdu Cinema is the long-standing stalwart of a very specific way of thinking about cinema. Cahiers is the origin point of two of the most powerful terms in film studies - Mise en Scene and Auteur. These two idea ideas served the specific purpose of separating cinema from literature, defining the central artist of cinema as the director and the canvas of their expression as the visual style constructed on screen rather than the words of the screenplay or the plot-points of the narrative. As such Auteur cinema pioneered and championed by Cahiersdu Cinema from the 1950s is premised on - and intrinsically connected to - discreet feature films made by singular auteur directors whose individual style and perspective can be identified across a body of feature films. As Andrew Sarris wrote:

“An expert production crew could probably cover up for a chimpanzee in the director’s chair. How do you tell the genuine director from the quasi-chimpanzee? After a given number of films, a pattern is established.”

So now, in 2010, we have a new issue of this Auteur obsessed journal where, according to its seminal founder Andre Bazin “it is the artists rather than the works that remain”. This 2010 issue is one with a TV show on the cover and serialised TV shows featured inside. What the hell is going on? Bazin would roll over in his grave..!

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