Auteur

For the band, see The Auteurs.

An auteur (/oʊˈtɜːr/; French: [otœʁ], lit. 'author') is an artist with a distinctive approach, usually a film director whose control is so unbounded, the director becomes the "author" of each film, and can manifest a personal style, vision, and thematic focus across a diverse body of work. Alfred Hitchcock was often mentioned as an auteur director with a unique, recognizable style that left an imprint of his "authorship" on all of his films.

The concept of auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s and '50s, and derived from the writings of André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc and François Truffaut. In 1962, American film critic Andrew Sarris popularized the concept in the United States, calling it the auteur theory. In the 1970s, partly due to the wide acceptance of the auteur theory, the New Hollywood era emerged with studios granting directors greater leeway. By the 1980s, however, several costly box-office failures prompted studios to take back a degree of control from directors.

Pauline Kael argued against auteur theory, saying that "auteur" directors depend heavily on the contributions of others, like cinematographers. David Kipen stated that the screenwriter is a film's main author, a viewpoint termed "Schreiber theory". Aljean Harmetz listed Casablanca (1942) as an instance where the producer and studio head exerted major creative control. Georges Sadoul deemed a film's putative "author" could even be an actor, but that cinema is at its core a collaborative art.

Notable examples of filmmakers cited as auteurs include Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, Sofia Coppola, John Cassavetes, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lars Von Trier, Baz Luhrmann, Hayao Miyazaki, Luis Buñuel, Guillermo Del Toro, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Sergio Leone, Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, Werner Herzog, Michael Bay, Robert Eggers, Tim Burton, Ari Aster, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Bong Joon Ho, the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Akira Kurosawa and Edgar Wright.

The auteur concept has also been applied to non-film directors, such as popular music producers and video game designers.

Film

Origin

Even before the formal development of auteur theory, the director was considered a film's most important influence. In Germany, early film theorist Walter Julius Bloem explained that since filmmaking is "art for the masses", and the masses "are naturally accustomed to admire that artist who submits his creations to them in tangible, palpable, and finished form", the director is a film's artist or poet; other contributors to a film are merely "apprentices" but not the artist who created "the completed and complex picture". James Agee, a leading film critic of the 1940s, said that "the best films are personal ones, made by forceful directors". Meanwhile, the French critics André Bazin and Roger Leenhardt emphasized that directors vitalize films, and through their choices of lighting, camerawork, staging, editing, and so on, express their own worldviews and impressions of the film's subject matter.

Development of theory

Film director and critic François Truffaut in 1965

As the French New Wave in cinema began, the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951, became a hub of discourse about the pivotal role of the film director. In a 1954 essay, François Truffaut criticized the prevailing "Cinema of Quality" whereby directors, faithful to the script, merely adapt a literary novel. Truffaut described such a director as a metteur en scene, a mere "stager" who adds the performers and pictures. To represent the view that directors who put their personality into their work make better films, Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des auteurs", or "the policy of the authors". He named eight writer-directors, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tati, and Roger Leenhardt, as examples of these "authors".

Jerry Lewis, a comedic actor from the Hollywood studio system, directed his own 1960 star vehicle, The Bellboy. Lewis's influence on it encompassed business and creative roles, including writing, directing, lighting, editing, and art direction. French film critics, in Cahiers du Cinéma and in Positif, praised Lewis's results. For his mise-en-scene and camerawork, Lewis was likened to Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Satyajit Ray. In particular, Jean-Luc Godard credited Lewis's "personal genius" for making him "the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn't falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles", "the only one today who's making courageous films".

Popularization and influence

In his essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962", published in Film Culture, Andrew Sarris translated the French phrase la politique des auteurs, first used by François Truffaut in 1955, into the term "auteur theory". Sarris applied the theory in his writings and reviews for Film Culture and The Village Voice. In his landmark 1968 book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, Sarris ranked and classified over 200 auteur directors, which further introduced the term to English-speaking filmgoers.

With the rise of auteur theory, critical and public scrutiny of films shifted from their stars to the creators and filmmakers. In the late 1960s and '70s, a new generation of American directors, in the so-called New Hollywood era, revitalized filmmaking by wielding increased control over their work, at a time when studios granted directors more freedom to take risks. But then in the 1980s, after high-profile failures like Heaven's Gate, studios reasserted control, muting the auteur theory.

Commercial and blockbuster auteurs

While the term "auteur" is commonly associated with highbrow and critically acclaimed directors, there are examples of commercial filmmakers with a distinctive style who have been labelled auteurs. Director and producer Michael Bay, for instance, was described by Peter Suderman of Vox as a "subversive cinematic auteur". According to Suderman, "few filmmakers are as stylistically consistent as Bay, who recycles many of the same shots, editing patterns, and color schemes in nearly all of his films", which have the commonality of heavy use of special effects, computer-generated imagery and explosions, down to its color palettes and filters, which retain a pattern of "neon color contrasts (especially teal and orange)" while "his movies often appear to take place in a perpetual magic hour, with moody sunsets and sunrises looming in the background". As such, despite the mixed and negative reviews of many of Bay's films, Suderman sums up his filmmaking in being consistently "big, loud, and dumb", which makes him a "subversive auteur".

Another figure cited as a commercial auteur is American actor and comedian Adam Sandler. The University of Iowa's Bijou Film Board says, "Sandler the producer has curated a catalog of comedies that bear a signature arguably as recognizable as that of an auteur director", and whose filmography is focused on "the value of family and friends". Ethan McGuire of The Dispatch observed that even when Sandler was not yet a husband or father, his film output "was reflecting seriously on what that should mean". Sandler was also an example of an actor auteur, who starred in his own films.

Criticism

Pauline Kael, an early critic of auteur theory, debated Andrew Sarris in magazines. In her 1971 essay "Raising Kane", she argued against characterizing the 1941 classic Citizen Kane as the handiwork of the auteur Orson Welles, claiming instead that the film was a collaboration in which co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland were instrumental.

Richard Corliss and David Kipen asserted that a film's success relies more on screenwriting than directing. In 2006, Kipen coined the term "Schreiber theory" to define this point of view. According to French cinema critic Georges Sadoul, while a film's main "author" can be an actor, screenwriter, producer, or the novelist whose work the film is based on, the film itself is always a collective endeavor. In her book Round Up the Usual Suspects, film historian Aljean Harmetz used Casablanca to illustrate a case where the producer (Hal Wallis) and studio president (Jack L. Warner) provided key creative input that shaped the final product. Harmetz writes that auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system".

Law

In some law references, a film is treated as artwork while the auteur, as its creator, is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law, largely by influence of auteur theory, a film director is considered the film's author or one of its authors.

Popular music

See also: Art pop and Recording studio as an instrument

Record producer Phil Spector in 1964

Auteur theory has occasionally been applied to music creation. 1960s record producer Phil Spector is considered the first auteur among producers of popular music. Author Matthew Bannister named him the first "star" producer. Journalist Richard Williams wrote:

Spector created a new concept: the producer as overall director of the creative process, from beginning to end. He took control of everything, he picked the artists, wrote or chose the material, supervised the arrangements, told the singers how to phrase, masterminded all phases of the recording process with the most painful attention to detail, and released the result on his own label.

Another early pop music auteur was Brian Wilson, influenced by Spector. In 1962, Wilson's band, the Beach Boys, signed to Capitol Records and swiftly became a commercial success, whereby Wilson became the first pop musician credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. Before the "progressive pop" of the late 1960s, performers typically had little input on their own records. Wilson, however, employed the studio like an instrument, as well as a high level of studio control that other artists soon sought.

According to The Atlantic's Jason Guriel, the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds, produced by Wilson, anticipated later auteurs, as well as "the rise of the producer" and "the modern pop-centric era, which privileges producer over artist and blurs the line between entertainment and art. [...] Anytime a band or musician disappears into a studio to contrive an album-length mystery, the ghost of Wilson is hovering near."

See also

• Authenticity in art
• Film d'auteur
• La mort de l'auteur
• List of film auteurs
• Philosophy of film
• Vulgar auteurism

General and cited references

• Bannister, Matthew (2007). White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7546-8803-7.
• Bloem, Walter Julius (1924). The Soul of the Moving Picture. E.P. Dutton.
• Butler, Jan (2012). "The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and the Musicology of Record Production". In Frith, Simon; Zagorski-Thomas, Simon (eds.). The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 978-1-4094-0678-5.
• Caughie, John (2013). Theories of Authorship. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-10268-4.
• Cogan, Jim; Clark, William (2003). Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-0-8118-3394-3.
• Edmondson, Jacqueline, ed. (2013). "Producers". Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories that Shaped our Culture [4 volumes]: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories That Shaped Our Culture. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-313-39348-8.
• Eisenberg, Evan (2005). The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. Yale University Press. p. 103. ISBN 978-0-300-09904-1.
• Kamina, Pascal (2002). Film Copyright in the European Union. Cambridge University Press. p. 153. ISBN 978-1-139-43338-9.
• Kipen, David (2006). The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History. Melville House Pub. ISBN 978-0-9766583-3-7.
• Miller, Jim (1992). "The Beach Boys". In DeCurtis, Anthony; Henke, James; George-Warren, Holly (eds.). The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music. New York: Random House. ISBN 9780679737285.
• Min, Eungjun; Joo, Jinsook; Kwak, Han Ju (2003). Korean Film: History, Resistance, and Democratic Imagination. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-275-95811-4.
• Sadoul, Georges; Morris, Peter (1972). Dictionary of Film Makers. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02151-8.
• Santas, Constantine (2002). Responding to Film: A Text Guide for Students of Cinema Art. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-8304-1580-9.
• Thompson, Kristin; Bordwell, David (2010). Film History: An Introduction. McGraw-Hill Higher Education. ISBN 978-0-07-126794-6.
• Williams, Richard (2003). Phil Spector: Out of His Head. Music Sales Group. ISBN 978-0-7119-9864-3.
• Willis, Paul E. (2014). Profane Culture. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-6514-7.

Further reading

• Ashby, Arved, ed. (2013). Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers After MTV. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-982734-3.
• Diver, Mike (October 8, 2014). "The Return of the Video Game Auteur". Vice.
• Maule, Rosanna (2008). Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain Since the 1980s. Intellect Books. ISBN 978-1-84150-204-5.
• Schatz, Thomas (1993). "The New Hollywood". In Collins, Jim; Radner, Hilary; Collins, Ava Preacher (eds.). Film Theory Goes to the Movies. New York: Routledge. pp. 8–37.
• Shuker, Roy (2013). "Auteurs, Stars, and Music History". Understanding Popular Music. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-56479-8.

External links

• 16+ source guides: Auteur Theory/Auteurs at the British Film Institute
• Auteurism Is Alive and Well by Andrew Sarris on Internet Archive
• The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929–1968