11 mars 2010

Hollywood or not Hollywood? (Cahiers)

Except for 1955 and 1957, the Hollywood auteurs are in minority in Cahiers' yearly Top10 lists... And only 1 Best Picture Oscar and 2 nominees (the opinion of the Academy, "the System") coincide with Cahiers' taste during the 50ies (years 51-54 missing). That's a total of 23 titles out of the 70 listed there (33%), and not even a systematic hold up of all the top spots. Therefore 67% of non-American auteurs who operate outside the Hollywood system, and most of them outside the pre-"Politique des Auteurs" European studio system, announcing the emancipation of non-commercial cinema, independent cinema, the artfilm niche.
Overall the non-Hollywood system auteurs still dominate the preferences of the Cahiers team, who supposedly favoured the Hollywood system. That's not overwhelmingly conclusive for the very team who invented the notion of "auteur within the system"...
The "studios auteurs" praised by the Young Turks were still far from the heart of The System, even when it was fashionable to like genre movies.

See also : Hollywood system auteurs?

1 commentaire:

HarryTuttle a dit…

And Jonathan Rosenbaum thinks that Cahiers Jaune was all about Hollywood... Sure!

"Although I've only read a few portions of de Baecque's La Cinéphilie, it seems clear that part of what he implicitly means by "classical cinephilia" is French cinephilia-which is quite different in many respects from the American brand, at least theoretically. As Raymond Bellour described it in 1997,

French cinephilia was . . . from the beginning American. "How can one be a Hitchcocko-Hawksian?" It's a question of theory, but even more of territory. This is what necessarily divides me from Jonathan, in whom cinephilia was born, like in everybody else, through the nouvelle vague, but who, as an American, takes the nouvelle vague itself as an object of cinephilia-whereas the cinephile, in the historical and French sense, trains his sights on the American cinema as an enchanted and closed world, a referential system sufficient to interpret the rest."
Framework, spring 2009