Technique of Film Editing, Reissue of 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

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Cam é ra-Stylo

In a now famous critical piece,

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Alexandre Astruc, fi lm-maker and critic, wrote:

The cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, something that all other arts have been before it, particularly

painting and the novel. After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement rather like the th é â tre de

boulevard , and a way of preserving images of the times, it is becoming, little by little, a language. A language; that’s to say,

a form in which and through which an artist can express his thought, however abstract it may be, or translate his pre-

occupations in exactly the same way as he does today with the essay or the novel. That’s why I call this new age of the

cinema that of the cam é ra-stylo … .

… The silent cinema tried to give birth to ideas and meanings by symbolic associations. We have realised that they

exist in the image itself, in the natural progression of the fi lm, in every gesture the characters make, in every one of

their words and in the camera movements which bind the objects one to another, and the people to the objects … .

… this implies, naturally, that the screen-writer make his own fi lms. Better still, that there no longer be such things as

screen-writers, for in this cinema the distinction between author and director no longer makes any sense. Film direction

is no longer a way of illustrating or presenting a scene, but really a way of writing it … .

Astruc ’s piece has not been forgotten because it did crystallise in a useful expression — cam é ra-stylo — a way in

which young French intellectuals began to think of the cinema. It was an instrument of thought and feeling in

which the fi lm-writer could express himself as freely as the novelist. The camera must be used as a pen.

The fi lm director was a writer — or to use the French word most appropriate — auteur . The French cinema

had often been in the hands of its writers. Pr é vert’s work for Carn é , Spaak’s for Duvivier spring to mind. But

the writer exerted a control over the director which critics began now to feel was unproductive. Astruc and

his supporters drew attention to the unreal distinction between the writer and the visualiser. Excellence, as in

so many other arts, should spring, they felt, from the unity of one controlling mind. The cumbersome giant of

the cinema must be cut down to manageable proportions that one man, the creator, could handle.

Chapter 18

Nouvelle Vague

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Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la cam é ra-stylo (L’Ecran Fran ç ais, number 144, 30 March 1948).