Auteur

An auteur (/oʊˈtɜːr/; French: [otœʁ], lit. 'author') is an artist with a distinctive approach, usually a film director whose filmmaking control is so unbounded and personal that the director is likened to the "author" of the film,¹ thus manifesting the director's unique style or thematic focus.² As an unnamed value, auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s,³ and derives from the critical approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, whereas American critic Andrew Sarris in 1962 called it auteur theory.⁴⁵

American actor Jerry Lewis directed his own 1960 film The Bellboy via sweeping control, and was praised for "personal genius". By 1970, the New Hollywood era had emerged with studios granting directors broad leeway. Pauline Kael argued, however, that "auteurs" rely on creativity of others, like cinematographers.⁶⁷ Georges Sadoul deemed a film's putative "author" could potentially even be an actor, but a film is indeed collaborative.⁸ Aljean Harmetz cited major control even by film executives.⁹ David Kipen's view of the screenwriter as indeed the main author is termed Schreiber theory. In the 1980s, large failures prompted studios to reassert control. The auteur concept has also been applied to non-film directors, such as video game designers.¹⁰

Notable examples of filmmakers cited as auteurs include Robert Bresson¹¹, Jean-Luc Godard¹²¹³, Jacques Tati¹¹, Wes Anderson¹⁴, Christopher Nolan¹⁵, Agnes Varda¹⁶, Chantal Akerman¹⁷, Sofia Coppola¹⁸, John Cassavetes¹⁹²⁰, Alejandro Jodorowsky²¹, Lars Von Trier²², Baz Luhrmann²³, Hayao Miyazaki²⁴, Luis Buñuel²⁵, Guillermo Del Toro²⁶, Francis Ford Coppola²⁷, Spike Lee²⁸²⁹, Sergio Leone³⁰³¹, Andrei Tarkovsky³², Béla Tarr³³, Werner Herzog³⁴, Michael Bay³⁵, Robert Eggers³⁶, Tim Burton³⁷, Ari Aster³⁸, Martin Scorsese³⁹, Paul Thomas Anderson⁴⁰, Bong Joon Ho⁴¹, the Coen brothers⁴², Quentin Tarantino⁴³, Ingmar Bergman⁴⁴⁴⁵, Stanley Kubrick⁴⁶, David Lynch⁴⁷, Akira Kurosawa⁴⁸ and Edgar Wright⁴⁹.

Even before auteur theory, the director was considered the most important influence on a film. In Germany, an early film theorist, Walter Julius Bloem, explained that since filmmaking is an art geared toward popular culture, a film's immediate influence, the director, is viewed as the artist, whereas an earlier contributor, like the screenwriter, is viewed as an apprentice.⁵⁰⁵¹ James Agee, a leading film critic of the 1940s, said that "the best films are personal ones, made by forceful directors".⁵¹ Meanwhile, the French film critics André Bazin and Roger Leenhardt described that directors, vitalizing films, depict the directors' own worldviews and impressions of the subject matter, as by varying lighting, camerawork, staging, editing, and so on.⁵²

As the French New Wave in cinema began, French magazine Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, became a hub of discourse about directors' roles in cinema. In a 1954 essay,⁵³ 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.⁵⁴ To represent the view that directors who express their personality in their work make better films, Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des auteurs", or "the policy of the authors".⁵⁵ 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".⁵³

Jerry Lewis, an actor from the Hollywood studio system, directed his own 1960 film The Bellboy. Lewis's influence on it spanned business and creative roles, including writing, directing, lighting, editing, and art direction. French film critics, publishing 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".⁵⁶

As early as his 1962 essay "Notes on the auteur theory", published in the journal Film Culture,⁵⁷ American film critic Andrew Sarris translated the French term la politique des auteurs, by François Truffaut in 1955, into Sarris's term auteur theory. Sarris applied it to Hollywood films, and elaborated in his 1968 book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, which helped popularize the English term.

Via auteur theory, critical and public scrutiny of films shifted from their stars to the overall creation.⁵¹ In the 1960s and the 1970s, a new generation of directors, revitalizing filmmaking by wielding greater control, manifested the New Hollywood era,⁵⁸⁵⁹ when studios granted directors more leeway to take risks.⁶⁰ Yet in the 1980s, upon high-profile failures like Heaven's Gate, studios reasserted control, muting the auteur theory.⁶¹

While the term "auteur" is commonly applied to highbrow and critically acclaimed directors, there are examples of commercial filmmakers with a distinctive style who have been labelled as auteurs. Director and producer Michael Bay, for instance, was described by Peter Suderman, from 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".⁶²

Another example of an auteur of commercial films is American actor, comedian and filmmaker Adam Sandler, who, according to the Bijou Film Board of the University of Iowa, "has curated a catalog of comedies that bear a signature arguably as recognizable as that of an auteur director", whose point of focus of his filmography is "the value of family and friends". In fact, according to Ethan McGuire from The Dispatch, even when "he was neither a husband nor a father", he "was reflecting seriously on what that should mean". Along with being a director and producer, Sandler also is an example of an actor auteur, who has starred on his films alongside character actors who are known for being recurringly cast in his movies, such as Kevin James, Allen Covert, and Jonathan Loughran.⁶³⁶⁴

Pauline Kael, an early critic of auteur theory,⁶⁵⁶⁶⁶⁷ debated Andrew Sarris in magazines.⁶⁸⁷ Defending a film as a collaboration, her 1971 essay "Raising Kane", examined Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane, asserting extensive reliance on co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and on cinematographer Gregg Toland.⁶⁹

Richard Corliss and David Kipen argued that a film's success relies more on screenwriting.⁷⁰⁷¹⁷² In 2006, to depict the screenwriter as the film's principal author, Kipen coined the term Schreiber theory.

To film historian Georges Sadoul, a film's main "author" can also be an actor, screenwriter, producer, or novel's author, although a film is a collective's work.⁸ Film historian Aljean Harmetz, citing classical Hollywood's input by producers and executives, held that auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system".⁹

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.⁷³

The references of auteur theory are occasionally applied to musicians, musical performers, and music producers. From the 1960s, record producer Phil Spector is considered the first auteur among producers of popular music.⁷⁴⁷⁵ Author Matthew Bannister named him the first "star" producer.⁷⁵ 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.⁷⁶

Another early pop music auteur was Brian Wilson,⁷⁷ influenced by Spector.⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹ Before the "progressive pop" of the late 1960s, performers typically had little input on their own records.⁸⁰ Wilson, however, employed the studio like an instrument,⁷⁸ as well as a high level of studio control⁸¹ that other artists soon sought.⁷⁷

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."⁸²