Teaching Film Auteurs

In the 1960s, the movies arguably made their most significant headway into the classrooms of the US colleges and universities first and foremost as the products of directors refigured as authors. Directors of the European new-wave cinema, like Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Antonioni, offered films whose aesthetic and textual challenges aligned them with modernist literature and art. They and their films became comparable to the canonical writers and texts taught in English and foreign language departments, from Bertolt Brecht's plays to the novels of William Faulkner and Marguerite Duras. The focus on auteurs at once facilitated and reduced how film has been taught, while also identifying critical and theoretical flashpoints that open film studies to other rich issues.