But what is an auteur?
Auteur is French for "author" and its meaning in the sense of auteur theory in film criticism is just that: the identification and exploration of a film's "author".
The term was developed during the French New Wave of the 1960s by a group of writers (and directors) for the magazine Cahiers du cinema. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Andre Bazin were particularly influential in developing and propagating the idea of auteur theory.
Truffaut, Godard and the like pioneered the idea that a film's sum total can be ascribed to the work of its director. Film, an obviously collaborative art, had not previously been viewed as an art form. Naturally, part of art is to have an artist - someone whose vision or authorship guides the art work.
Auteur theory borrowed heavily from literary theory. Critics might examine a collection of works by the same director and attempt to find some unifying ideas, a through-line.
Formalism (technique-driven criticism) and Structuralism (theme-driven criticism) are served equally well by auteur theory. Where in literature, an author like Poe can be seen to fixate on first-person narratives, a plethora of exclamation marks, frequent alliteration or one like Rowling can be seen to invent neologisms, so too can directors be read on a formalist level. Take, for example, Brian de Palma's obsessive use of split-screen editing, or Kubrick's use of corridors as sets.
Similarly, where one can read Austen as commentary on women's roles in society or Crichton as being ill-at-ease with but seduced by technology, one can examine Altman's preoccupations with the formation of communities or Spielberg's glorification of the human condition.
While auteur theory is no longer the dominant force of film criticism, having been replaced by feminist and queer theory, semiotics, deconstruction, apparatus theory and psychoanalytic theory, it is still the backbone of these schools. One cannot do a feminist reading of Psycho without addressing Hitchcock as its author.
It is in the humble tradition of auteur theory that this blog is inspired. It is an attempt to suss out what distinctive traits make a director an auteur and how to read his/her oeuvre accordingly.
