What is auteur theory?

Auteur comes from the French and is most often translated as composer (of music), author (of literature, or perpetrator (of a crime). The first recorded use of the term in France was in 1896, and conformed to sense of auteur as composer. 1936 marks the first French use of the term to describe an author of a work of literature. However, the term became most popularized in film theory, due to the work of François Truffaut in the 1950s. Truffaut was part of a group of film critics who wrote for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Many of the critics for this journal were also directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer.

Truffaut was a also a director. In 1954 Truffaut published a landmark essay called, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français.” In it he discussed a series of European (mostly French) film directors including Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati, and Roger Leenhardt. He classified them as “auteurs” of their films. This term was a distinction from the terms that had previously signified directors, namely, réalisateur or metteur-en-scène (director, but with an emphasis on the role of staging the scene). The new term singled out directors who “write their dialogue and … invent the stories they direct,” from those who merely adapted others’ works.

Also significant was Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 essay, “Birth of a New Avant-Garde.” In it, Astruc proposes the idea of the caméra-stylo, or “camera-pen”. This is the idea that directors used their cameras like writers used their pens. The essay also implied that cinema could break free of the limitations of narrative and become a language as flexible as that of the written word. Truffaut was influenced by this theory in his coining of the term auteur. The director that was truly the author of his filmic product.

Co-founders of Cahiers du Cinéma Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and André Bazin recognized the importance of Truffaut’s distinctive definition of the term. Doniol-Valcroze noted that “From then on, it was known that we were for Renoir, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Cocteau, Bresson, and against X, Y, and Z.” Bazin expanded the definition in accordance with his own theories of personalism stating that auteur directors utilized a “personal factor” that linked their films together or made them identifiable specific to that director. Thus, American directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Orson Welles and Howard Hawks, could now be considered auteurs even though they operated under the Hollywood system which was a highly collaborative process.

Therefore an auteur as is a film director whose personal influence and artistic control over his or her films are so great that he or she may be regarded as their author. These films may be regarded collectively as a body of work sharing common themes or techniques. An individual style or vision. An auteur retains a high degree of independent artistic control over his/her work from conception to production or performance. An auteur is any artist whose work is perceived to reflect a highly individual vision or innovative approach or is (self-consciously) presented as such. Both of these definitions emphasize control as being at the heart of the auteur’s practice; auteurism marks an ability to manipulate (that is, control and direct) the filmic medium.

The British film magazine Movie was founded in May 1962 The British film magazine Movie was founded in May 1962. It ascribed to the ideas of auteurism by featuring a ranking of directors in its first issue. Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock were "great," filmmakers. Joseph Losey, Anthony Mann, Vincent Minnelli, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk and Orson Welles were among the "brilliant” filmmakers This list was initially controversial as it singled out the figure of the director over the film itself as being worthy of criticism. Truffaut was quoted as saying, controversially, “There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors.” Movie reflected this idea in its first issue by including a hierarchy of directors as opposed to films. Ian Cameron, one of the writers featured in the September 1962 issue of Movie, summarized the journal’s purpose: “The assumption that underlies all the writing in Movie is that the director is the author of a film, the person who gives it any distinctive quality.” The term auteur came to denote a “cinema of directors.”

The same year Andrew Sarris a film critic for the New York Times published an essay entitled, “Notes on Auteur Theory,” in which he delineated the criteria for an auteur director; technical competence, personal style and interior meaning or themes. Later Sarris emphasized that, “The auteur theory values the personality of a director precisely because of the barriers to its expression” referring to the “barriers” constructed by mainstream Hollywood. He considers the following directors worthy of critical attention; Charlie Chaplin, Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D.W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir, Josef von Sternberg and Orson Welles Consequentially, the role of the film critic, Sarris concluded, was to isolate and evaluate “the personality of director” from his/her finished product: the film.

The uses of the term in France, Britain and the United States all had in common a desire to stir-up contemporary conceptions of cinema. One main distinction from this goal existed in France. The definition of the auteur- director became a motivation for a politique des Auteurs (a practice of auteurs). Because Truffaut’s definition referred to both a method of looking at films, as well as a proposal to produce or reproduce the qualities of these directors, it became one of the driving forces and models for French directors of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), A cinema that incorporated a highly idiosyncratic style.

Auteurism provoked much controversy on both sides of the Atlantic primarily due to its exclusion of the other important figures that participated in the inherently collaborative process of cinema and film-making. Screenwriters, cinematographers, producers and some even argued actors, also left their mark on films, but were not given the privileged titled of auteur. Auteur theory emphasized the primacy of the director’s vision. Formalist theories stand in direct opposition to Sarris’s definition of Auteur theory. They emphasize the interpretation of what is in the frame without the aid or influence of external influences on that interpretation. These external factors might include two of the essential components of auteur theory; the biography of the director and the rest of their body of work. Exclusion of these contextual details in film criticism minimizes the importance of the director and accentuates formal features of the film.

Other critics of Auteur theory objected to it on the grounds of its failure to take into account the influence of the conformity of production imposed by the studio system in Hollywood. Film critic Pauline Kael theorized that Sarris’s support of Auteur theory was part of a larger objective to underscore the supremacy of American cinema in general. In particular, Sarris was perpetrating the ideology that directors managed to exert creative control over their product despite Hollywood’s relentless pursuit of financial remuneration.