Films as War Machines: Politique des auteurs, Latin America, Independendent Cinema

OUBIÑA, DAVID

Conferencia; Conferencia para el Department of Film & Media y el Department of Spanish and Portuguese; 2011

University of California, Berkeley

The French critic Serge Daney uses the expression "War Machine" to make reference to the politique des auteurs professed by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma in the 50s and the 60s. Daney's expression underlines the beligerent attitude of those young critics (the so called young Turks: Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol) in the defense of some forgotten, despised or disregarded filmmakers. For these critics, true film auteurs belonged to an oppositional tradition that they invented in their essays for Cahiers du cinéma. And I would argue that we could follow the development of this oppositional tradition in the films of certain Latin American avant-garde directors of the 60s and 70s against dominant cinema (like Glauber Rocha) and in the emergence of contemporary independent films as an option to mainstream cinema (like the work of Pedro Costa). This genealogy of opposition confronts and debates with an other, more usual sequence where the politique des auteurs imperceptibly flows into the auteur theory (as a scholarly category) and, from the auteur theory into the auteur cinema (as a mainstream genre among others).