The man who coined the phrase "la politique des auteurs" in the 1950s --Francois Truffaut-- explained that the worst of [Jean Renoir]?'s movies would always be more interesting than the best of [Jean Delannoy]?'s. He and his colleagues at the magazine [Cahiers du Cinema]? recognized that moviemaking was an industrial process. But they proposed an ideal to strive for: using the commercial apparatus just the way a writer uses a pen. And so they valued the work of those who neared this ideal.
These critics -- Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer--wrote mostly about directors, although they also produced some shrewd appreciations of actors. Later writers of the same general school have emphasized the contributions of star personalities like [Mae West]?.
However, the stress was on directors, and it seemed arbitrary to many. When [Andrew Sarris]? spread these ideas to the United States, he aggravated the problem by calling auteurism a 'theory,' as though it were an explanation of how films are made.
Screenwriters, producers and others reacted with a good deal of hostility.
But "politique" should probably have been translated as 'policy'; it involves a decision to look at movies in a certain way and to value them in a certain way. Truffaut provocatively said, "There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors." What he meant was that art can't be arrived at by some quality-control process -- finding an 'important' subject, hiring a 'distinguished' playwright, finding 'authentic' locations, and so on. A movie might fail in many ways and still be important as a revelation of what some creator thinks and feels.
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