In film criticism, the 1950s-era auteur theory holds that a director's films reflect that director's personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar "auteur" role for films that they have produced. The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors (or, more rarely, producers, or writers) who are considered to have a distinctive, recognizable style, because they (a) repeatedly return to the same subject matter, (b) habitually address a particular psychological or moral theme, (c) employ a recurring... The Auteurs were a vehicle for the songwriting talents of Luke Haines (guitar, piano and vocals). ... Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. ... Director Herbert Brenon with actress Alla Nazimova on the set of War Brides, 1916 A director is a person who directs the making of a film. ... This article is about motion pictures. ...

In law the auteur is the creator of a film as a work of art, and is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law the film director shall always be considered the author or one of the authors of a film. Not to be confused with copywriting. ...

Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. "Auteurism" is the method of analyzing films based on this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director's work that makes her or him an auteur. Both the auteur theory and the auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical Cahiers du cinéma. François Roland Truffaut (French IPA: ) (February 6, 1932 – October 21, 1984) was one of the founders of the French New Wave in filmmaking, and remains an icon of the French film industry. ... Year 1954 (MCMLIV) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... François Truffauts New Wave film Jules et Jim The New Wave (French: la Nouvelle Vague) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced (in part) by Italian Neorealism. ... Cahiers du cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. ...

History

Origin

Auteur theory draws on the work of André Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers du cinéma, who argued that films should reflect a director's personal vision. Bazin championed filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir. Although Bazin provided a forum for auteurism to flourish, he himself remained wary of its excesses. Another key element of auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen" and the idea that directors should wield their cameras like writers use their pens and that they need not be hindered by traditional storytelling. André Bazin on the cover of the third volume of the original edition of Quest-ce que le cinéma? André Bazin (April 18, 1918 – November 11, 1958) was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist. ... Howard Winchester Hawks (May 30, 1896 – December 26, 1977) was an American film director, producer and writer of the classic Hollywood era. ... Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (August 13, 1899 â€“ April 29, 1980) was an iconic and highly influential British-born film director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. ... Jean Renoir Jean Renoir (September 15, 1894 – February 12, 1979), born in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris, France was a film director. ... Alexandre Astruc is a French film director born July 13, 1923, in Paris (France). ...

Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that moviemaking was an industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for: the director should use the commercial apparatus the way a writer uses a pen and, through the mise en scène, imprint his or her vision on the work (conversely, the role of the screenwriter was minimized in their eyes). While recognizing that not all directors reached this ideal, they valued the work of those who neared it. Mise en scène [mizɑ̃sÉ›n] has been called film criticisms grand undefined term, but that is not because of a lack of definitions. ... Screenwriters, scenarists, or script writers, are authors who write the screenplays from which movies and television programs are made. ...

Truffaut's development

In his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("a certain trend in the French cinema"), François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des auteurs", and asserted that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting than the best of Jean Delannoy's. "Politique" might very well be translated as "policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to look at films and to value them in a certain way. Truffaut provocatively said that "(t)here are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors." François Roland Truffaut (French IPA: ) (February 6, 1932 – October 21, 1984) was one of the founders of the French New Wave in filmmaking, and remains an icon of the French film industry. ... Jean Delannoy (born January 12, 1908 in Noisy-le-Sec, Île-de-France) is a French, actor, film editor, screenwriter and film director. ...

Much of Truffaut's writing of this period, and of his colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers du cinéma was designed to lambaste post-war French cinema, and especially the big production films of the cinéma de qualité ("quality films"). Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile, old-fashioned cinéma de papa (or "Dad's cinema"). During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did not allow the exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. When French film critics were finally able to see these 1940s U.S. movies in 1946, they were enamoured of the dark style of what came to be called the film noir style of U.S. films. Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carne), one of the greatest French films ever made La regle du jeu (Jean Renoir), another candidate for the best French film LAtalante (Jean Vigo) La belle et la bête (Jean Cocteau) Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson) Vivre sa Vie (Jean... Motto Travail, famille, patrie French: Unoccupied zone of Vichy France (until November 1942) Capital Vichy Capital-in-exile Sigmaringen (1944-1945) Language(s) French Religion Roman Catholic Government Dictatorship Chief of state  - 1940 — 1944 Philippe Pétain President of the Council  - 1940 — 1942 Philippe Pétain  - 1942 — 1944 Pierre Laval... Vichy (Occitan: Vichèi) is a French commune, situated in the département of Allier and the région of Auvergne. ... Actors Bogart, Lorre, Astor and Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941) The Maltese Falcon (1930) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett that has been adapted several times for the cinema. ... Citizen Kane is a 1941 mystery/drama film released by RKO Pictures and directed by Orson Welles, his first feature film. ... This still from The Big Combo (1955) demonstrates the visual style of film noir at its most extreme. ...

Truffaut's theory maintains that all good directors (and many bad ones) have such a distinctive style or consistent theme that their influence is unmistakable in the body of their work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of both directors with a marked visual style (such as Alfred Hitchcock), and those whose visual style was less pronounced but who had nevertheless a consistent theme throughout their movies (such as Jean Renoir's humanism).

Impact

The auteur theory was used by the directors of the nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement of French cinema in the 1960s (many of whom were also critics at the Cahiers du cinéma) as justification for their intensely personal and idiosyncratic films. One of the ironies of the auteur theory is that, at the very moment Truffaut was writing, the break-up of the Hollywood studio system during the 1950s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of films Truffaut admired were actually being made. The New Wave (French: Nouvelle vague) of French cinema was a cinematic movement of the 1960s. ... American cinema has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. ... The studio system was a means of film production and distribution dominant in Hollywood from the early 1920s through the early 1950s. ...

The "auteur" approach was adopted in English-language film criticism in the 1960s. In the UK, Movie adopted auteurism, while in the U.S., Andrew Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962". This essay is where the half-French, half-English term, "auteur theory", originated. To be classified as an "auteur", according to Sarris, a director must accomplish technical competence in his or her technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior meaning (although many of Sarris's auterist criteria were left vague). Later in the decade, Sarris published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which quickly became the unofficial bible of auteurism. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Andrew Sarris is a film critic and a leading proponent of the Auteur theory of criticism. ...

The auteurist critics—Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer—wrote mostly about directors (as they were directors themselves), 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 screenwriters, producers and others have reacted with a good deal of hostility. Writer William Goldman has said that, on first hearing the auteur theory, his reaction was, "What's the punchline?" Jean-Luc Godard (French IPA: ) (born 3 December 1930) is a French filmmaker and one of the most influential members of the Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave. Born to Franco-Swiss parents in Paris, he was educated in Nyon, Switzerland, later studying at the Lycée Rohmer, and the... Claude Chabrol (French IPA: ) (born June 24, 1930, Paris) is a French film director and has become well-known since his first film, Le Beau Serge (1958) for his chilling tales of murder, including Le Boucher (1970). ... Éric Rohmer (born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, April 4, 1920, Tulle, France) is a French film director and screenwriter. ... MAE-West is a major Internet peering point located in San Jose, California. ... William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American novelist, playwright and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. ...

Criticism

Starting in the 1960s, some film critics began criticizing auteur theory's focus on the authorial role of the director. Pauline Kael and Sarris feuded in the pages of The New Yorker and various film magazines. One reason for the backlash is the collaborative aspect of shooting a film (one person cannot do everything) and in the theory's privileging of the role of the director (whose name, at times, has become more important than the movie itself). In Kael's review of Citizen Kane, a classic film for the auteur model, she points out how the film made extensive use of the distinctive talents of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland. Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. ... For other uses, see New Yorker. ... Citizen Kane is a 1941 mystery/drama film released by RKO Pictures and directed by Orson Welles, his first feature film. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Gregg Toland (1904-1948) was an influential American cinematographer, most noted for his work on Orson Welles Citizen Kane. ...

As well, the very people who had once championed the auteur theory began to back away from it. Godard handed over much creative control to others (most notably Jean-Pierre Gorin) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an ironic twist, Truffaut's later films embraced the same formalism he rejected early on in his career. Costly "auteur" films like Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate showed that an "auteur's" expansive creative vision, if unchecked, could put a studio out of business. Jean-Pierre Gorin (born 1943, in Paris) is a gay French filmmaker and professor, best known for his work with Nouvelle Vague luminary Jean-Luc Godard during what is often referred to as Godards radical period. ... Michael Cimino (born February 3, 1939, New York City) is an Australia film director. ... Heavens Gate is a 1980 western movie, which depicts a highly fictionalized account of the Johnson County War, a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s. ...

The auteur theory was also challenged and undermined by the influence of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism. The New Critics argued that critics made an "intentional fallacy" when they tried to interpret works of art by speculating about what the author meant, based on the author's personality or life experiences. New Critics argued that that information or speculation about an author's intention was secondary to the words on the page as the basis of the experience of reading literature. New Critics suggested that the internal evidence of the work of literature itself—the text—was the appropriate object of literary criticism. This ushered in a variety of text-centered approaches to understanding literature which had tremendous influence on subsequent film theory and criticism, such as semiotics and structuralism. New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... The intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, is the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. ... Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for analyzing, among other things, the film image, narrative structure, the function of film artists, the relationship of film to reality, and the film spectators position in the cinematic experience. ... Semiotics, semiotic studies, or semiology is the study of signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. ... Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ...

The influence of psychoanalytic film theory further undermined the auteur theory by raising the issue of the unconscious of both the "author" and the text itself. Subsequent theories of reception and cultural studies approaches broadened the context of meaning and interpretation as manifestations of culturally determined institutions in which authors and readers (directors and spectators) as well as texts (films) and their meanings are produced and reproduced. However, this view is disputed by the psychiatrist Rollo May (in his book The Courage To Create)—as well as other psychologists (such as Anthony Storr) who have studied individuals who create art—who points out that cultures depend on the visions, dreams and creative output of individuals within them to shape them. So the notion that the roots of an individual artist's work can be traced back to the collective creative product of his or her culture is circular since the product of said culture must come from the works of individual storytellers and artists within it. Such claims however miss the point made by reception and cultural studies that any attempt to determine the true or original meaning of a work of art with recourse to either its author or the original context of its creation is only another moment of consumption and production within a given social and historical context, in other words, the creation of a new "text" and a new "production" of meaning in the current cultural context, rather than an authoritative statement concerning the meaning or value of the original. Psychoanalytic theory is a general term for approaches to psychoanalysis which attempt to provide a conceptual framework more-or-less independent of clinical practice rather than based on empirical analysis of clinical cases. ... This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Reception Theory is a version of Reader Response literary theory that emphasizes the readers reception of a literary text. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Rollo May (April 21, 1909, Ada, Ohio - October 22, 1994, Tiburon, California) was the best known American existential psychologist, authoring the influential book Love and Will in 1969. ... Anthony Storr, is a psychiatrist and author. ...

External links

• 16+ source guides: Auteur Theory/Auteurs at the British Film Institute
• Authorship and The Films of David Lynch - a critical essay from The British Film Resource