A short definition for auteur theory
AUTHORSHIP (AUTEUR THEORY, la politique des auteurs)
An approach to film analysis and criticism that focuses on the ways in which the personal influence, individual sensibility, and artistic vision of a film’s director might be identified in their work (see also direction). Before the 1950s, serious film criticism tended to focus on questions of ontology and aesthetics (see medium specificity), with little attention to the craft of filmmaking. With a few notable exceptions—D.W. Griffith, G.W. Pabst, Sergei Eisenstein, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Roberto Rossellini—few directors were known by name. From the late 1940s, however, a group of cineastes influenced by the writing of André Astruc and André Bazin began looking at cinema through the literary prism of authorship. The film studies journal Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, provided a forum for articulating what became known as the politique des auteurs, a phrase coined by François Truffaut in a 1954 article, ‘A certain tendency of the French cinema’, and roughly translatable as the auteur policy, but commonly rendered in English as the auteur theory. This approach celebrated the film director as an auteur—an artist whose personality or personal creative vision could be read, thematically and stylistically, across their body of work. The identification of a particular film style that could be associated with a director and traced from film to film was considered the ultimate authorial signature. The auteur policy drew a distinction between workmanlike directors—metteurs en scène—who produced well-crafted films and true auteurs who were able to create art: Michael Curtiz was placed in the first category, for example, and Nicholas Ray in the second. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Cinémathèque Française offered the Cahiers critics the opportunity to view a wide range of films, including many by US directors (Hollywood films had been restricted in France during the German occupation in World War II, and arrived after the war in a glut) (see film studies journal; France, film in). These exceptional viewing conditions enabled a director’s films to be viewed side-by-side in a manner impossible for film critics elsewhere. Particular praise was reserved for US directors who, despite conditions of production that militated against it, produced distinctive and personal works: hence the high valuation of Alfred Hitchcock. This celebration of artistry at the heart of the studio system stood in sharp contrast to the critical and pessimistic view of Hollywood proposed by the Frankfurt School (see critical theory). Authorship approaches have proved influential and durable: the auteur theory directly influenced the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague; and indeed a number of them actually promulgated the movement in the pages of Cahiers. In Britain, Lindsay Anderson, writing in the journal Sequence, translated and discussed some of these writings, and this influenced both the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave. In 1962, the film critic Andrew Sarris popularized the idea of film authorship in the US: he created a nine-part schema to rank a large number of directors, thus beginning a formative debate about the films that might constitute a canon of great work. The impact of the auteur theory can hardly be overestimated. The initial debate and its wide influence shaped film criticism, film culture, and the development of film studies and film theory in a range of cultural contexts. ...
Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Authorship. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 28 Aug. 2023
In the library's collections
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Introductory reading(s)
The elusive auteur: the question of film authorship throughout the age of cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .A837 H64 2017ISBN: 9781476668734The director's authorial role in filmmaking--the extent to which a film reflects his or her individual style and creative vision--has been much debated among film critics and scholars for decades. Drawing on generations of criticism, this study describes how the designation "auteur" has gone from stylistic criterion to product label--in what has always been an essentially collaborative industry. ...
Film and authorship by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .A837 F55 2003ISBN: 9780813531939During the 1960s, when cinema first entered the academy as a serious object of study, the primary focus was on auteurism, or on films authorship. Burgeoning cinema studies courses demonstrated how directors were the authors of work that undermined (or succeeded in spite of) all the constraints that Hollywood threw at them. New critical methods were introduced as the field matured, and studies of the author/director, for the most part, were considered obsolete. ...
The global auteur: the politics of authorship in 21st century cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .A837 G55 2016ISBN: 9781501312625Once heralded and defined by the likes of François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. ...
Selected book title(s)
An auteurist history of film by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .A1 S535 2016ISBN: 9780870709777Beginning in 2009, The Museum of Modern Art offered a weekly series of film screenings titled "An Auteurist History of Film." Inspired by Andrew Sarris' seminal work The American Cinema, which developed on the idea of 'auteur theory' first discussed by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, the series presented cinematic works from MoMA's expansive collection with particular focus on the role of the director as artistic author. For the five years that the series was presented, film curator Charles Silver wrote a concise post to accompany each screening. These texts described the place of each film in the oeuvre of its director as well as its significance to wilder film history. Following the end of the series' long run, the Museum has collected these posts for publication, bringing together Silver's insightful and often humorous readings of the series' films into a single volume. ...
Auteurs and authorship: a film reader by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .A837 A98 2008ISBN: 9781405153348Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader offers students an introductory and comprehensive view of perhaps the most central concept in film studies. This unique anthology addresses the aesthetic and historical debates surrounding auteurship while providing author criticism and analysis in practice. ...
Genre, authorship and contemporary women filmmakers by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781474425278Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers examines the significance of women’s contribution to genre cinema by highlighting the work of US filmmakers within and outside Hollywood – Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers and Kelly Reichardt, among others. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz interrogates questions of ‘genre’ authorship; the blurring of the borders between commercial and independent cinema and gendered discourses of (de)authorisation that operate within each sphere; ‘male’–‘female’ genre divisions; and the issue of authorial subversion in film and popular culture in a wider sense. ...
The limits of auteurism: case studies in the critically constructed New Hollywood by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780813589152The New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 1970s has become one of the most romanticized periods in motion picture history, celebrated for its stylistic boldness, thematic complexity, and the unshackling of directorial ambition. The Limits of Auteurism aims to challenge many of these assumptions. Beginning with the commercial success of Easy Rider in 1969, and ending two years later with the critical and commercial failure of that film's twin progeny, The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, Nicholas Godfrey surveys a key moment that defined the subsequent aesthetic parameters of American commercial art cinema. The book explores the role that contemporary critics played in determining how the movies of this period were understood and how, in turn, strategies of distribution influenced critical responses and dictated the conditions of entry into the rapidly codifying New Hollywood canon. ...
Other library resource(s)
Auteurism from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Auteurism has arguably been at the center of film practice, theory, and historiography since the 1950s. Originating in the films and writings of the French New Wave, and specifically in the film criticism of the Cahiers du Cinéma during the 1950s, auteurist criticism usually located the creative center of a film in the controlling perspective of the film’s director, thus shifting attention away from the studio system that defined filmmaking before 1945. ...
