Essay on The Romantic Notion of a Film Director

For the purpose of this essay, I will investigate the death of cinema as a series of deaths: three as identified by Jean-Luc Godard, as well as the ideas surrounding the ‘modern death’ of cinema – technological change and the corporatisation of film. Furthermore, I will aim to understand why such discourses hold such importance to certain auteurs and types of cinema.

The director is responsible for overseeing creative aspects of a film. They develop the vision for a film and carry the vision out, deciding how the film should look. The director may also be heavily involved in the writing and editing of the film, as well as managing the script into a sequence of shots, coordinating the actors in the film and supervising musical aspects. The Auteur Theory suggests that films contain certain characteristics or ‘signatures’ that reflect the director’s individual style and give a film its personal and unique stamp. Hayao Miyazaki is one such auteur whose entertaining plots, compelling characters

In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.

For a movie to proceed to its final “point”, a filmmaker must have an image of what has to be and not be familiarized. Source three unveiled, ”Clements

The auteur theory holds that a director's hand is clearly and consistently evident in their work, regardless of involvement in the rest of the production process. It's not uncommon for artists to have a signature or quirk--- Author Stephen King uses simplistic writing and significant world building to frame his often dark and fantastical stories, and some painters choose to put their own hair or saliva into their work rather than a signature. In the same way, an auteur's films have an instantly recognizable atmosphere, motif, or even color palette--- and, just as importantly, such an impression can give insight into an auteur's life and mind, lending that much more weight to a body of work. Two such auteurs are thriller and suspense master

A film auteur will often display a distinctive style through their respective oeuvre with their films being easily recognizable as a reflection of the director, show

In the simplest form, an “auteur” is the author of a film in which who writes and directs their own films and which are usually very unique. The word auteur originated in France and is the outline for an abstract approach to film making where as the director is seen as the central artistic force in a motions picture. The word auteur was introduced in France during the late 1940’s founded by François Truffaut who was a French director turned Auteur however Andre Basin would be categorized as the “father of auteurism” as he was one of the founders of the “Cahiers du Cinema” which was a prestigious French film magazine, the young critics writers of this French magazine are the cause of the works of an Auteur to be pushed on to Hollywood and

1. Introduction: The Auteur Theory is suggesting about which the director should be therefore regarded as an auteur, which means that how the director presenting their mind into the movie. It can mainly divide into how the directors well-using the film technology, how the audience are able to identify the director personality and style, which serve as a signature, and the interior meaning in the film. For Auteur Theory, Francois Truffaut (1954) suggested that a good director exerts such a distinctive style or promotes such a consistent theme that his or her influence is unmistakable in the body of his or her work.

The auteur theory first began in the 1950s by a group of young French scholars who wrote for the journal Cahiers du Cinema. Most significant of these scholars was Francois Truffaut who wrote an article that served as the touchstone for auteurism. The auteur principle is used as a descriptive method that focuses not on whether a director is a great director but rather on the fundamental composition of a director’s work. This principle therefore focuses on a director’s thematic and stylistic uniformity, established filming method, personal artistic vision, recurring themes and most significantly his control over a film’s production. Auteur films are distinctive due to the unique artistic vision of its director and the fact that it imbues his personality. The auteur term is consequently used to distinguish directors whose works are distinguishable from others. It is important to note that not all directors can be auteurs. Only certain directors were able to express their personality through their works with the use of themes and style and would therefore to continuously produce the same types of stories. Looking at all of a director’s work was the only way to identify their individuality and to be able to place their mark on a film suggested the strength of the director as an artist.

Andrew Sarris, a renowned film critic, clarified the Auteur Theory to be the notion that “the way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels,” and that “good directors express style and theme across their body of work,” (Stam 89; Sampson, Lecture 8.2). Although director Jonathan Glazer has a diverse body of work, his personal themes and style are able to shine through across all visual mediums, thus proving him to be a good director, according to Andrew Sarris’s interpretation of the Auteur Theory. In his “Odyssey” commercial for Levi Strauss, his music video for “Rabbit in Your Headlights” by Unkle, and his film Birth, the combination of his themes of persistence and unclear identities, along with his style of capturing people’s faces and use of tracking shots reveals his worldview that human beings are complex and strong entities.

Auteur Theory is based on three premises, the first being technique, the second being personal style, and the third being interior meaning. Furthermore, there is no specific order in which these three aspects must be presented or weighted with regard to a film. An Auteur must give films a distinctive quality thus exerting a personal creative vision and interjecting it into the his or her films.

Studies of the Auteur Theory in film have often looked toward Alfred Hitchcock as an ideal auteur: an artist with a signature style who leaves his own mark on every work he creates. According to the theory, it does not matter whether or not the director writes his own films, because the film will reflect the vision and the mind of the director through the choices he makes in his film. In the case of Hitchcock’s earliest films when he was still under the control of his producers, there is still a distinct stamp upon these images. Hitchcock has said that he was influenced by the German Expressionists, and admired their ability “to

The significance of auteur theory and how it was directly a product of post-war French cinema has shaped film forever. This paper will analyze the beginnings of auteur theory and the theories of François Truffaut and his group of film critics as well as the effects of post-war France had on film. More specifically, this paper will help link the ideas of auteur theory with the works of Jean-Luc Godard, a noted French filmmaker that revolutionized the idea of what an auteur is. To define auteur theory is impossible as it has no set definition. Many of defined and theorized on auteur theory, the results have been assorted.

According to film theorists Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, by describing how a thing or event might be, art is able to broaden our conceptual grasp of history by opening up sites of discourses that allow for reinterpretation of our understanding of the past. They write, “The main tradition of Western aesthetics, deriving from Aristotle’s Poetics, adopts the view that art “imitates” nature or, in Hamlet’s phrase, holds ‘the mirror up to nature,’ so if the ideal of art is to create an illusion of reality, the motion picture made it possible to achieve this ideal in an unprecedented way” (Film and Reality, 141). The film The Act of Killing (2012) attempts to reveal just how the aesthetic experience can shape an understanding of historical responsibility.

This chapter will examine the independence of meta-cinema and authorship. As Valck and Hagener stated in An Introduction to Cinephilia, auteurisim - a cinematic practice set up due to the prominence of the film director - emerges from passionate attendance and critiques on films in Cahiers du Cin?ma, and further aims to cultivate cinematic literacy among the audience (Valck and Hagener, 1999). Thus, auteurist concerns can be summarised as appealing to the articulation and reception of filmmakers? self-reflexivity. David Bordwell has indicated in his analysis on European art cinema that the stress of authorship covers the distinct style of art cinema practices (Bordwell, 1979). In his essay, representative art films are introduced as models conveying authorial marks, among which are Day for Night (La Nuit Am?ricaine, Truffaut, 1973) and 8 ? (Fellini, 1963). In order to demonstrate this, I will take in this chapter these two films together with Tout Va Bien (Godard and Gorin, 1972) as illustration. Determined by Bordwell as adversary to art cinema, the third reflexive work balances the discussion on the projection of auteurism in meta-cinema as an interrogating approach. All examples reflect the process of filmmaking and embody or question the auteurist concerns on directors? individuality and the uniqueness of cinema as an art. These concerns have been stated in film critiques and have embraced post-war European cinema. First coined by Fran?ois Truffaut as