Auteur

The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors who are considered to be artists with their own unique vision. The style of an auteur is recognisable in his/her films regardless of their genre and subject matter. However, this style does not need to be purely visual—any unique point-of-view or obsession could be considered the mark of an auteur. It is more a stamp of the director's personality that marks a body of work as that of an auteur.

It was first coined in the François Truffaut film article "A Certain Tendancy of the French Cinema." Truffaut condemned certain French directors for adapting classic French literature very strictly. He complained about their "formalism" and how they did not take advantage of the potentials the camera could achieve. However, he and other critics (including Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer) of the Italic textCashers du CinemaItalic text championed many American directors (particularly Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks) for their full use of the camera and the cinematic style that was imprinted on all of their films. In America, film critic Andrew Sarris began an American tradition of auteur critism.

A director may of course be talented without being an auteur; directors such as Michael Curtiz and John Huston were great filmmakers but they are not usually considered auteurs because they did not have a recognisable style that appeared in all their films.

In recent years, there has been a backlash agaist the auteur theory. One reason is the technical aspects of shooting a film. One person cannot do everything. In Pauline Kael's review of Citizen Kane, a classic film for the auteur model, she points out how the film involved the talents of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland and would have been hurt without their distincitve ability. Also, the very people who championed the auteur theory backed away for it. Godard handed over much creative control to others (most notably Jean-Pierre Gorin) in his later films while, in a twist of irony, Truffaut later films embraced the same formalism he rejected early on in his career. Also, with costly films like Heaven's Gate, the excesses of auteurism not only created uncreative films, they put studios out of business.

However, even with the reevaulation of auteurism, the auteur theory continues to influence new filmmakers to this day.

List of auteurs

Well known auteurs include: