It is a strange but much noted fact that in the cinema there is rarely any simple correlation between a director’s output and his reputation. John Ford had made some 50 films, mostly two-reelers, before ever making a name for himself: Roger Corman has made over 40 in ten years, and it is still too early to decide whether his present reputation is anything more than a transitory fad. At the same time other directors like Resnais and Truffaut have seen their names made at festivals overnight, on the flimsy basis of an interesting first film: or, like Jean Vigo, have acquired and held an enormous reputation with a total output of three films—one full feature, one short feature, and one documentary, left unfinished. Some of the reasons why this should happen are obvious, and would apply in any artistic field—publicity build-ups, intellectual fashions and changes of taste, and of course the lasting quality of the films themselves. But there is a further factor built into the structure of the cinema as we know it today, which is unique to the film, and which is responsible for the basic dichotomy between what I would call transparent and opaque cinema.

The cinema of Vigo, Truffaut and Antonioni, and the best European cinema in general, can be described as transparent. The director wears his intentions all the time on his sleeve. He is conscious of what he is doing and articulate about it, and his success depends on his being able to sell his ideas openly to producers and to the critical public. He has sufficient freedom in making his film to express himself as he wishes, and if his intentions are not immediately clear from the finished work, then they will be made so by explanatory interviews and sympathetic criticism from the right quarters. This situation allows for the production (impossible in Hollywood) of highly individual masterpieces like L’Age d’Or or Lettre de Sibérie, but equally for much that is well intentioned, but crudely ideological, rootless and inartistic.

Opaque cinema, by contrast, is that cinema (generally American, but Mizoguchi and perhaps Rossellini can be added to the category) in which neither the director’s intentions nor his achievement can easily be measured in terms of superficial fanfares about original genius. For one thing the achievement may, in exceptional cases, be greater for extraneous reasons than anything consciously intended by the director. For another the intention may be repressed by the production system. The specific distinction of many American directors only becomes apparent with time, and after they have made enough films for the patient critic to be able to trace, through occasional flashes of an obviously personal concern recurrent throughout the director’s work, the connecting thread of a consistent style and set of attitudes. Of the great American directors only Orson Welles had from the beginning the intellectual status and the blatant originality necessary to blast his way to eminence with a first film.