ER,

I've been talking about this article since Jean-Claude Biette died,
and using the terms as if they were defined in English somewhere, but
I can't tell you which posts. I'm waiting to see if an editor of
Trafic will give me the English rights in return for my waiving
payment for my contributions through the years, which I never expect
to be paid for anyway. Then I'll translate the article for
sensesofcinema.com, who want a tribute to Jean-Claude.

The first 3 terms are pretty self-evident. A regisseur/director is
just someone who directs movies, not an artist; a metteur-en-scene is
an artist who expresses himself through how he/she directs; an auteur
is someone who expresses him/herself through themes, obsessions and
other continuities (J-C says the auteur is always too much "in a
hurry" to express himself to bother with the form: John Huston); and
a cineaste ("filmmaker") - here's where it gets very trick - is
somone whose films are engaged both with the world and history,
including personal history, on the one hand, and with the history of
the artform on the other.

One characteristic of a cineaste is that he/she doesn't simply
recycle the cliches of the era (as De Sica recycles Italian petit
bourgeois ideology in Bicycle Thief) and the cliches of the medium at
the moment the cineaste engages with it. But the examples he gives of
films by cineastes - all of Murnau, Bunuel and the Straubs, all of
Walsh except The Enforcer, Huston's The Dead - require a full
translation to even begin to understand what he's getting at. If I
can't get the rights, I'll just go ahead and quote genrously in a
tribute to Jean-Claude for senses, and I'll post a link here.

A lot of talk after I joined was about whether all directors are
auteurs - in the sense of having constants, including formal ones -
and if so, whether the use of "auteur" as a value judgement wasn't
problematic. I think Jean-Claude's four terms give us much-needed
flexibility in talking about writer-directors like Wilder or
Mankiewicz who are obviously auteurs and flawless - too flawless -
metteurs-en-scene of their own visions, for example, while
encouraghing us not to neglect them because we feel the "something
else" that makes a cineaste is missing. Jean-Claude notes that films
by this class of directors can even be more beautiful than those of
certain cineastes, citing The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and The
Ghost and Mrs. Muir as examples. That's the category he puts the
Coens in. And a long article called "La barbe de Kubrick" ("Kubrick's
Beard"), written before he invented the terms, talks about how
the "grains of sand" in the mechanism of an oeuvre erected
in "idolatry of Cinema" make Lolita (which he says he had seen 7
times) and Eyes Wide Shut (where he stresses the seemingly vacuous
repetition of phrases) the work of a cineaste. Grains of sand seem to
have a lot to do with what pulls a film or filmmaker into the fourth
category.

I have started using these categories half-blindly because I want to
push past some of the theoretical and terminological road blocks that
keep auteurism from developing. A post where I was doing that was the
one on Mystic River, where I had just about decided it was a film by
a masterful metter-en-scene and auteur when I read Andy Klein's
remark about the (no doubt unintentional) parallels with 9/11 and
Afghanistan and Iraq and decided I wasn't so sure. Etc.