Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon (review)

Despite the deliberate vagueness of its main title, this volume offers a powerful reassessment of the auteur tradition in contemporary Francophone cinema, specifically the work of Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke and François Ozon. The obvious charge that this is an all-male line-up—all the more odd if one considers that some of the most powerful cinema in French is currently being produced by female directors like Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat—is pre-empted by the editor’s statement that another book on women directors was in preparation with Manchester University Press at the same time. In a succinct and efficient introduction, the editor argues for a more nuanced and capacious conception of engaged auteurism that puts into question the earlier male heroics of the Nouvelle Vague and moves firmly beyond normative heterosexual conceptions of the family. The five essays included all extend these key points in different ways. Martin O’Shaughnessy provides an incisive study of the changing nature of political commitment in the post-industrial project of the Dardenne brothers, from the early documentaries to the later fictions that produce a shift from the ethico-political to the purely ethical. Paul Sutton explores the ‘catastrophic mode’ and contradictory presentation of reality in Assayas’s films, although the argument is perhaps too much determined by the views of another critic. Ince’s own contribution traces Ozon’s treatment of the couple and shows how the notion of ‘home’ is reinvented as ‘a place open to a radical transformation of patriarchy, a queer and unpredictable space that invites new and unspecified social formations’ (p. 126). This is a sensitive account, yet the assertion that Ozon is ‘France’s first mainstream queer auteur’ (p. 113), as if Cocteau had never existed, remains problematic. The most far-reaching and illuminating chapters are those by Julia Dobson and Libby Saxton on Audiard and Haneke respectively. Dobson analyses the auteurist trope of filiation and the contesta-tory approach to realism in Audiard’s work, arguing very persuasively that it goes beyond standard notions of both filial relations and the hierarchical assumptions of auteurism in favour of change and reinvention. Saxton’s complex, multi-layered and beautifully written chapter on Haneke gets to the core of his provocative work, namely the manipulation of the viewer. Through impressive close readings of films like Caché, Saxton offers a bold interpretation of a director who deconstructs the illusions of mediated suffering encouraged by the media in an attempt to give back to violence what it truly is (i.e. pain to another). Haneke is revealed to be attuned to the ‘fragile, transitory, liquid ethical bonds which survive in a diegetic reality where intersubjective relations are increasingly mediated by technology’ (p. 86). A photograph of Haneke on set provides the cover image, but otherwise this volume is sadly devoid of illustrations. Rounded off by a brief conclusion, more a coda, the collection as a whole will be of greatest interest to students, although researchers already familiar with the directors featured will also find much to engage with and admire.