Film Theories

AUTEUR THEORY

In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author").

In law, the film is treated as a work of art, and the auteur, as the creator of the film, is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law, the film director is considered the author or one of the authors of a film, largely as a result of the influence of auteur theory.

Auteur theory was advocated by film director and critic François Truffaut. This method of film analysis was originally associated with the French New Wave since 1954.

 Its Origin Auteur theory draws on the work of a group of cinema enthusiasts and argued that films should reflect a director's personal vision.

 The championed filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Jean Renoir are known as absolute "auteurs" of their films.

 Another element of auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's "camera-pen", which encourages directors to wield cameras as writers use pens and to guard against the hindrances of traditional storytelling.

The auteur theory was used by the directors of the nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement of French cinema in the 1960s (many of whom were also critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma) as justification for their intensely personal and idiosyncratic films. One of the ironies of the Auteur theory is that, at the very moment Truffaut was writing, the break-up of the Hollywood studio system during the 1950s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of films Truffaut admired were actually being made. The "auteur" approach was adopted in English-language film criticism in the 1960s. In the UK, Movie adopted Auteurism, while in the U.S., Andrew Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962". This essay is where the term, "Auteur theory", originated. To be classified as an "auteur", according to Sarris, a director must accomplish technical competence in their technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior meaning (although many of Sarris's auterist criteria were left vague[citation needed]). Later in the decade, Sarris published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which quickly became the unofficial bible of auteurism. The auteurist critics—Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer—wrote mostly about directors, although they also produced some shrewd appreciations of actors. However later Truffaut wrote: the auteur theory "was started by Cahiers du Cinema and is forgotten in France, but still discussed in American periodicals."

The original French version of auteur theory was the idea of making a film distinct to the director by infusing ideas of his own into the characters and story beyond what the script required. Jean-Luc Godard, in his article “Sufficient Evidence,” shows that despite the “conventional scenario” of a film, an auteur will probe stereotypes and archetypes to turn them into “living beings”

Attributes of an Auteur

·        An Auteur should showcase his expertise in all factors of Mise en Scene.

·        An Auteur should show a distinct signature of his flair in all his films that differentiates his films from that of others.

·        Internal Meanings derived from the scenes shall be crafted well by the Auteur.

·        Aauteur theory promotes the director as the author of a motion picture (Gerstner and Staiger 8). Behind every movie lies a director with a vision. The director gives the motion picture “any distinctive quality it may have” (Grant 31). Many motion pictures are extensively guided by a director from script to completion and are considered the work of that director. “The director is God in film” (Dangerous Days).

o For instance, Alfred Hitchcock’s films are recognizable not only for their story and stylistic elements but also for his standardized production method. Hitchcock is “universally acknowledged as the world’s foremost technician” and his form “does not merely embellish content, but actually creates it” (Truffaut 17). Hitchcock was known for creating detailed storyboards for each of his shots and both experimenting with and implementing filmmaking and storytelling conventions.

Jacques Rivette made a similar argument, saying that an auteur, rather than being at the mercy of a good or bad script, can take the material and turn it into his work (Hillier 38). (Hillier 48). This is why the French critics were so obsessed with filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock because of his tendency to add personal expression throughout his filmography (Truffaut 314). In fact, idolizing of Hitchcock led Truffaut to conduct an extensive, in-depth interview with the filmmaker and allowed him to publish it as Hitchcock.

What does one mean by Mise en Scene?

Mise-en-scène is a French term and originates in the theatre. It means, literally, "put in the scene." For film, it has a broader meaning, and refers to almost everything that goes into the composition of the shot, including the composition itself: framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and general visual environment, even sound as it helps elaborate the composition.

Mise-en-scène can be defined as the articulation of cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about. Cutting is about time; the shot is about what occurs in a defined area of space, bordered by the frame of the movie screen and determined by what the camera has been made to record.

CRITIC OF AUTHORSHIP THEORIES

Auteur theory ignores the writers, the studios, and the collaboration that goes into completing a motion picture project.

Film authorship theories fall into one of three categories: auteur, writer, or collaborative. Feature films are never made by a single person. From the writer to the director to the studio executives, many ideas and hours of hard work go into collaborating on a film production. It is important to know that one theory of authorship will not answer the question for all films.

Truffaut holds that a filmmaker, like any artist, fundamentally tries to show his audience how to understand themselves through artistic expression (Truffaut 20). Rather than a theory of authorship, Truffaut’s auteur theory argued that a director is an artist rather than a technician (Hess 50). His interviews with Hitchcock revealed the director to be a deeply emotional man who “feels with particular intensity the sensations he communicates to his audience” (Truffaut 15). This would make Hitchcock more than a craftsman or technician and elevate him as an artist.

Many critics agree that auteur theory is fraught with logical problems . For example, auteurism unnaturally elevates the director’s place within production and judges films based on their director rather than as an individual artistic work.

Graham Petrie says auteurism evades “all the sordid and tedious details of power conflicts and financial interests that are an integral part of any major movie project” (Grant 110). On a movie set, the director’s word is art, but the producer’s word is law. The producer keeps a film on budget and on time, if he’s doing his job. The director works for the producer unless they are the same person. Therefore the producer curbs the director’s vision— his authorship. It is “naïve and often arrogant” to assume the director is the only author that matters in the filmmaking process (Grant 112). Historically, critics have attempted to design formulas and methods with which to recognize auteurs separately from others. However, these methods “dumb down” the art into a matter of numbers and tally marks that destroy the purpose of analysis: to better appreciate the artistry present.

II. WRITER THEORY

Irving Thalberg said, “The writer is the most important person in Hollywood” (Kipen 13).

Since Andrew Sarris’s “Notes on Auteur Theory” (1962), anti-auteur critics have espoused screenwriters as the authors for their contribution to conception and drafting of the story.

In the silent film era, a director’s power over story was unquestionable due to a lack of any real screenplay. Early screenwriting obviously drew from theater. For the first time, filmmakers began to see writing the story as an integral part of the filmmaking process.

A narrative film must begin with a screenplay (Hatfield 2). Simply put, one cannot build a skyscraper without a blueprint. So who writes the story? As basic as it may sound, the individual or group who put the words to paper creates the story. A writer is the architect of the movie, while the director and his crew are the foreman and construction workers. Buildings are credited to their architect, not their builder. The original French auteur critics began to find more interest in a film’s script than its direction once they began making films of their own

Once a script is sold, the writer loses control of the final outcome of their idea. Directors are free to rework, edit, and interpret a screenplay “nearer to their heart’s desire”.  Writers often have no control in the interpretation of their story . 

III COLLABORATIVE THEORY

Paul Sellors claims that authorship—whether for novel, film, or fine art—is an issue of intention. This concept is not exclusive to a single person, but rather, it can be applied broadly to the studio, the director, and the writer if they all play a part in producing the final product. The contributions of the cinematographer and the editor also cannot be ignored in bringing the moving image to the screen.

Films are not created by a single consciousness. They come together as part of the collective effort by artists and technicians. Collective authorship comes from group intentionality moving towards a common goal.

Movies communicate a story. Therefore, the author(s) of a film is the party(s) who possesses the most intentionality behind the making of a film. Authorship comes from the “mutual interaction” between the world created and the creators. While the writers, directors, and producers create the work, the cinematographers, editors, and animators create the world that we perceive as the work. Films have many components that come together in “some degree of coherency”. This coherency is due to the audience’s perception of the whole rather than the parts. Rather than simply observing a camera angle, wardrobe choice, or an acting performance, the audience perceives the entire film as a single entity.

Collaboration theory also accounts for the contribution each artist or craftsman makes to the film, including above-the-line (director, producer, leading actors) and below-the-line jobs (grips, gaffers, extras). While certainly a motion picture’s personality can be linked to its major creators— director, producer, leading actors—all those who contribute play a part in its nuances that may go unnoticed by simple pattern analysis .

The producer can be considered the most responsible party in the production of a film because his or her role demands gathering the cast and crew necessary to pull off the production (Movie Staff). Once the necessary craftsman are in place, the producer becomes in charge of logistics rather than storytelling; this role falls to the director and to whom he choses to delegate certain tasks. However, the producer retains rights of the film; the crew does not. 

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