what exactly is the auteur theory in cinema?
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So we’ve got some answers heavily skewed by the Americanization of the auteur theory.
In its original form, the auteur theory was a manifesto created by French critics and filmmakers who were displeased with the commercial French film industry of the time. In their minds, the problem with the commercial film industry was that there was no central creative voice. The producer was in charge of the overall production, but the screenwriter wrote the story, the director was in charge on set, the editor pieces things together in post, etc.
They desired a form of cinema more in line with the traditional arts, where there is one singular artist or author. And to achieve this, they focused on the director, and suggested that the director should do *more* than direct—they should also write and produce the film, and in some cases even edit or shoot the film. With one person writing, directing, and producing, this would allow for a singular “author” (*auteur*) of the film.
But as part of this, the auteur theorists also looked at filmmakers—particularly American filmmakers—who had a distinctive style that they brought from film to film, and used them as a model for what an auteur should be. They looked at filmmakers like Hitchcock, for example, and said “well, since most of his films have very similar themes, aesthetics, and narrative tropes, he must be responsible for that consistency as a strong creative voice” (the problem here was that a filmmaker like Hitchcock worked with many of the same collaborators in film after film, and that *collaboration* was partly responsible for the consistency, but that’s a separate conversation).
The problem was that all of this was written in French, and when these ideas got brought to America by critics like Andrew Sarris, they only latched onto the idea of directors with a strong consistency of style. These critics used auteurism as a way to celebrate the great directors of American cinema, and many of the “film brats” of the ‘60s and ‘70s—the first generation of Hollywood filmmakers to come out of film school rather than apprenticing in the studio system—also latched onto this. As budding directors, they *loved* the idea that the director is the author, full stop. And so the auteur theory got simplified into the very reductive idea that “the director is the author”.
In reality, those filmmakers who qualify as “auteurs” are those who don’t just direct—they also produce their own films, and often have a hand in writing as well. When you see directors accepting an Oscar for Best Picture, it’s *not* because they directed it; it’s because they also produced the film (since Best Picture goes to the film’s producers, not the director).
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