Alexandre Astruc

Biography

Alexandre Astruc is one of the great film theorists; he was also a filmmaker. Unfortunately, but for one exception, his films fell short of his own critical ideals. One of his strongest arguments was for the idea of la caméra-stylo in which the camera is seen as a pen with its own unique language and that the images themselves add nuance and develop the narrative as much as the dialog does. According to Astruc in his article "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La caméra-stylo," camera movements "relate objects to objects and characters to objects. All thought, like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being and another human being...." Astruc started his film career in 1947 as an assistant to Marc Allegret on the film Blanche Fury. He spent the next two years working on two amateur films, and collaborating on two scripts with Archad. He made his professional directorial debut in 1949. The films he made were highly academic representations of his theories with an overattentiveness to style that frequently resulted in their having a cool abstract quality devoid of real human feeling or drama. His one notable exception is his film Une Vie (195, an adaptation of Maupassant that was exquisitely photographed by Claude Renoir. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi