Cinema is one of the most beautiful forms of art ever created by human beings. It is used to reflect the events of the objective reality, but the major advantage of the cinema is that it allows its creators to depict not only external, but also internal, i. e. personal, emotional, and psychological states of their characters or their selves. In this respect, the so-called auteurist cinema is of special importance for this research paper. This type of cinema presupposes the whole bulk of the cinema creation carried out by the film director. It includes production, writing, cast selection, etc. This paper will focus on the comparative analysis of the aesthetic styles found in two examples of the auteurist cinema – The 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut and India by Roberto Rossellini.
The film by the famous representative of the French New Wave cinema movement is viewed by many critics as an autobiographical movie. The plotline of the film develops around the life story of a problem child who is despised and not taken care of by his parents and relatives. In this aspect, the film is autobiographical as Francois Truffaut experienced all the events and emotions he presented in his movie. This is one of the major traits of the auteurist cinema as the one that acknowledges the priority of personal things over-generalized ones. In auteurism, a director is a major figure in film creation, and his or her views are viewed as the guidelines for all other people working on the picture.
Thus, Francois Truffaut, being not an ordinary director reflecting someone else’s ideas, attempts to display his inner world and his relationship with the outside one. Picturing a young boy rejected by the whole society, the author compares his fate to his one and draws the comparison between the image of the ocean in the film and the personality of Andre Bazin, who was his spiritual teacher and the person who saved Francois Truffaut from the criminal life and prison. The symbol of the ocean never seen by Antoine before is compared to the “father” whom Francois Truffaut never had and whom Andre Bazin became for him.
However, symbolism is not the only feature of auteurist cinema. The specific filming techniques distinguish it from mainstream cinema, especially the one that dominated the world in the 1950s when auteurist cinema was born. First of all, the already mentioned focus on a personality is observed in this aspect. It is manifested by long-lasting shots of a character’s face while his or her mind is busy with vital thoughts and emotional stresses. For example, the long focus on Antoine’s face when he was transported in a police car demonstrates this feature of auteurism. The final scene of The 400 Blows is also an example of this peculiarity because it as if leaves the watchers with the feeling of something unfinished and allows them to create the further development of the character’s life on their own. There are numerous other examples of the specific filming techniques used by Francois Truffaut including the shots from the air, long focuses on some minor details, black-and-white filming, etc. All this allows concluding that Francois Truffaut was one of the fathers of auteurism, and his The 400 Blows manifests this fact by being a bright example of this cinematographic movement.
Further on, the development of the auteurist cinema was greatly facilitated by Roberto Rossellini. The film of his chosen for this analysis is India shot in 1958. The major peculiarity of this film is its deviance from the standard, chronological, course of events as presented by the narrator. It is also the main peculiarity of Rossellini’s style – the protest against the norm and the attempt to make the film as informative and comprehensible for the watchers as possible. Due to this, the films by Roberto Rossellini are usually shot far from the traditional way of filming – the use of the third-person narrator can be suddenly substituted by the first person one, while the narration itself presented as a motion picture element suddenly can become a part of a documentary. All these peculiarities are true for India as well.
First of all, the film under consideration impresses the watchers with its non-traditional structure, as well as by the huge amounts of information it presents. Moreover, these amounts can be easily comprehended due to the already mentioned film structure. The point here is that India consists of four so-called vignettes among which each tells a story of ordinary people put in the socio-political context of life in India shortly after gaining independence. Francois Truffaut‘s movie, as contrasted, has a linear structure of events, and in this difference, the multifaceted nature of auteurism can be observed. For example, some vignettes tell stories of people who had to leave their families due to unemployment and need to search for work in other locations, stories about animals that, after living among people, are left in confusion between the animal and human worlds when their hosts die, etc.
What makes the film even more non-traditional in the common sense of this word is that the vignettes are followed by the documentary excerpts picturing the busy streets and crowded markets of Bombay. The black-and-white episodes inserted between the narrators’ stories presented as vignettes allow the watchers to become more aware of the peculiarities of Indian life in the 1950s. The sharp contrast between the novel-like narrations and purely scholarly documentary episodes allows the watcher to grasp the idea of the vignettes. As compared to Francois Truffaut’s film with its purely descriptive nature, India is a more informative cinematography piece reflecting another side of auteurism – focus on the private in the general context.
However, the symbolism of the auteurist cinema is also preserved in Rossellini’s film in the form of portraying the personal tragedies of ordinary people in the framework of social development and life continuation. Rossellini, as compared to Francois Truffaut, uses more generalization and does not let his film become a personal account of the hardships of life. Accordingly, the analysis of the two auteurist films allows concluding that auteurism as a cinematography movement is a multifaceted phenomenon. It can be both intrapersonal and interpersonal, meaning that the watchers can either see the personal experiences of the main hero and the film director or be introduced to the more general, social context and view the same phenomena, i. e. auteur’s and protagonists experiences and ideas, as related to the general picture of the human interrelations.