Auteur theory (film criticism)
Auteur theory in film criticism is a concept that emphasizes the director as the primary creative force behind a film, asserting that their personal vision and stylistic choices significantly shape the final product. Originating from the insights of French film critic and filmmaker François Truffaut in the 1950s, the theory emerged from the French New Wave movement, which highlighted independent directors who broke away from conventional filmmaking styles. Truffaut's foundational essay contrasted the traditional filmmaking approach with a more individualistic, artistic cinema, arguing that directors should be viewed as artists akin to authors of literary works.
In 1962, American critic Andrew Sarris further articulated the theory, proposing three key premises: the technical abilities of a director are indicative of their film’s quality, directors possess a distinctive personality that can be discerned in their body of work, and cinema itself is an art form deeply influenced by the director’s vision. While initially focused on notable figures from the French New Wave, the concept has been retrospectively applied to many filmmakers throughout cinematic history, including Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and more contemporary figures like Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino. Despite some criticisms and limitations, auteur theory remains a significant framework for analyzing and evaluating films, suggesting that a director’s influence is a crucial element in understanding a film's artistic merits.
Auteur theory (film criticism)
In filmmaking, auteur theory is an idea that explores the notion of authorship as it relates to motion pictures. By its very nature, filmmaking necessitates collaboration among many different creative talents, including the director, screenwriter, actors, cinematographer, and art director, among others, who are organized in a hierarchical structure under the producer. Given this amalgamation of personnel, attempts to ascribe the artistic results of a given film to the efforts of any single member of the collaborative team were long viewed as problematic. Auteur theory solves this problem by forwarding the idea that it is the director, above all, who is primarily responsible for the final product generated by the filmmaking process.
Historical Background
The idea of auteur theory is rooted in the work of an influential circle of French film critics led by the theorist and filmmaker François Truffaut. In 1954, Truffaut published an essay titled "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," which is now considered to be the foundational piece of critical scholarship that led to the subsequent development of auteur theory.
In the essay, Truffaut drew a sharp distinction between what he calls the "tradition of quality" in French filmmaking, centered on the stylistic trappings of psychological realism, and the emergent "auteur's cinema" of the movement now known as the French New Wave. Spearheaded by a generation of young directors working independently of the French film industry's established channels, the French New Wave was defined by a stark, never-before-seen artistic style driven by the personal visions and subjective perceptions of its directors. Auteur is the French word for "author," and as such, auteur theory posits that the director essentially serves as the author of a film, in much the same way that a playwright is considered to be the author of a play.
Truffaut's work and, to a large degree, the French New Wave itself grew out of the ideas of a group of film theorists and critics associated with the cinema journal Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. The magazine helped launch the directorial careers of several noteworthy film theorists-turned-filmmakers, including Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, who went on to become the luminaries of the French New Wave movement. It was in Cahiers du cinéma that Truffaut's original essay, along with many subsequent pieces that further contributed to the development of auteur theory, were published.
In 1962, the American film critic Andrew Sarris, a leading early proponent of auteur theory, broke the idea down into three constituent premises. According to Sarris, auteur theory's first premise is that a director's technical capabilities have value as a criterion in film criticism; in other words, a capable director tends to make good movies, while a substandard director tends to make bad movies. The second premise Sarris identifies is that directors have a distinct "personality," detectable through the visual style, subject matter, themes, and overall tone of their works. Finally, and most importantly for Sarris, auteur theory posits that cinema is a form of art, and a significant measure of a given film's meaning arises from the relationship between the director's personality and the material he or she ultimately produces.
Sarris alternately describes auteur theory as a series of three concentric circles, with the outermost circle encapsulating a director's technique and mastery of form; the middle circle capturing his or her personal vision and idiosyncratic style; and the innermost circle reflecting his or her psychological makeup as part of a film's meaning. Furthermore, Sarris emphasizes that auteur theory is best applied to the whole of a director's body of work, rather than simply to isolated cases and individual films.
Application and Implications
While auteur theory as a critical idea was first used to describe the work of the founders and leaders of the French New Wave, the idea quickly found retrospective applications in film history. Truffaut, Sarris, and other film critics and theorists set out to view the works of noteworthy directors through the lens of auteur theory, an undertaking that ultimately led to an unofficial list of "auteur directors" whose shaping hands were palpable beneath the surface trappings of the movies they made.
Truffaut pointed to French director Jean Renoir and the famous Hollywood filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock as examples of auteurs, while Sarris expanded the list to include Max Ophüls, Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Orson Welles, Roberto Rossellini, F. W. Murnau, D. W. Griffith, Josef von Sternberg, Sergei Eisenstein, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, and Robert Bresson. In compiling his list of auteur directors, Sarris acknowledged that as many as 200 other filmmakers met most or all of his evaluative criteria and that there was no single, set way to identify or recognize an auteur.
Auteur theory has become a mainstay of film theory and criticism, emerging as a convention by which films and filmmakers are judged and evaluated. The idea that a film's director is primarily responsible for the artistic and dramatic success of the final product has become so widely accepted that it is essentially taken for granted by contemporary critics and audiences, and a film's direction is now frequently used as a starting point for the critical evaluation of the movie as a whole. While Truffaut's famous assertion that "there are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors" has proven to have its limitations, auteur theory continues to be applied to the work of directors working in the modern day.
Although there is no universally agreed-upon list of directors who came to be regarded as auteurs after auteur theory took hold in the world of film criticism, contemporary scholars and critics have cited filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant, Woody Allen, David O. Russell, Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Christopher Nolan, and Stanley Kubrick as the leading auteurs of film history's modern era.
Bibliography
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"Auteur Theory—Everything You Need to Know." Nashville Film Institute, www.nfi.edu/auteur-theory/. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Barbosa, Julius. "The Top 10 Modern Auteur Filmmakers." The Script Lab, 24 Feb. 2015, thescriptlab.com/features/the-lists/3183-the-top-10-modern-auteur-filmmakers#. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Sarris, Andrew. "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962." Film Culture, 1962, pp. 561–564, alexwinter.com/media/pdfs/andrew‗sarris‗notes‗on‗the-auteur‗theory‗in‗1962.pdf. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Truffaut, François. "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema." Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31, Phaidon Press, 1954. New Wave Film, www.newwavefilm.com/about/a-certain-tendency-of-french-cinema-truffaut.shtml. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
"What is Auteur Theory? – Definition and Examples." Indie Film Hustle, 20 Feb. 2023, indiefilmhustle.com/auteur-theroy/. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.