[Thread] 1. Some discussion of auteur theory happening again. Quitea can of worms but I wanted to summarize my take on it here just in case anybody’s interested. I’m going to be extremely general & colloquial.

2. Auteur theory was never meant to suggest that the director is personally responsible for every single thing in a movie and deserves credit or blame for every single thing in a movie. That’s a distortion of the theory.

3. The original focus in France in the late 1950s/early 60s was the director because under the Hollywood studio system the work of directors was often erased. Producers & studios tended to take credit and because their“house style“ was often so strong, they weren’t out of bounds.

4. Of course there were always exceptions like Cecil B DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, etc., but it wasn’t the norm. And the work of directors in “B movies“ — often genre pictures like crime, the western, the musical — tended to be overlooked by critics and scholars & the press.

5. One of the central, greatest, contributions of this theory was the idea that art can be found in all sorts of genres. You don’t have to have the pedigree of adapting Shakespeare or a prizewinning novel. You can find it in a western, a melodrama, etc.

6. When the theory got imported to the United States in the late 1960s and blossomed in the early 1970s things started to change and the “director as rockstar“ came in. All the attention started to focus on the director. This, I think, is when the distortion really took hold.

7. It’s important to reiterate here that auteur theory is complicated and multi layered and it was always a Morphis and evolving, so this thread is not intended to convey everything about it. I’m just focusing on this one aspect, the idea of who gets credit for things.

8. Auteur theory is not sexist. The industry itself, in nearly every country that has one, is sexist, and that’s the problem. Combine these inequities with a distortion of the basics of the theory and you get “the director as rockstar“ – typically a male rockstar.

*amorphous dammit— that’ll teach me to tweet before I have my coffee

9. I don’t believe it’s possible to look at the work of a filmmaker like Agnes Varda, Sofia Coppola, Ava Duvernay, Lynn Ramsay, Claire Denis, etc. and not see s powerful validation of the original core idea behind auteur theory. Which is something like 1/2

The person in production who exerts the strongest personality/style/amount of power tends to dictate the course of the production. That might be the director. But it isn’t always the director. Under the old stereo system it often was not the director. 2/2

Directors in the old studio system were treated like actors. They had a certain thing they were considered to be “good at“ — like George Cukor directing love stories/“women’s pictures“ or John Ford directing westerns— and they got typecast and their choices were often overruled.

One of the great things about this new understanding of the director was it gave them more freedom & control & more of a public profile. Of course that was also one of the bad things, and the sexism of the industry contributed to some God complexes and elevated mediocrities.

I wrote a lot of other observations for this thread but they are trapped in drafts, for some reason. I might return to this thread at some later date. Bottom line: it’s a good theory, very useful, and the problem is the distortion/misapplication of it.

Also, I know I lost the numbering in certain point, but hey, I am the auteur of this thread, and I hereby declare that I meant to do it.

Also: every day, we film buffs should be thanking the French critics of the 1950s who developed auteur theory, because without them, there wouldn’t be as much deep appreciation of great art happening in “disreputable” genres.

Marvel, Pixar, Disney, and a few other studios absolutely deserve primary credit for the totality of films they release. The directors are hired guns there, even when they are allowed to exert a lot of their own personality & feeling.

There was a long period where movie stars who also produced were really the primary authors of their movies. Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand are 2 examples. After a certain point every movie they made felt like one of “their“ movies regardless of who was credited as director.

Clint Eastwood is another example. Does anybody really think that Buddy Van Horn was the driving force of a movie that he directed but Clint Eastwood starred in? The “author“ is not automatically the credited director. It’s the big kahuna, whoever that is.

One thing that is of parenthetical interest to me here is the way that certain networks/streaming platforms are like the movie studios of old, and commission work that has a certain very distinct personality, HBO and FX being the primary examples.

Anyway, this is obviously a very rich subject that resists summary in any format. I advise people who are interested in this subject to seek out additional reading. This list is quite good. https://www.questia.com/library/communication/media-studies/film/auteur-theory

I should put an addendum here: a big motivation of auteur theory In the 1st place was to reclaim artistry from the system. Much of the attention focused on scrutinizing the careers of certain directors who worked for the “factory” of the studios to demonstrate they were artists.

The one thing that nearly everybody who gets called an “auteur” has in common is that they have a producing credit, and it actually means something (i.e. it isn’t ceremonial). Stars don’t have much power, but producer-stars have a lot. Ditto producer-directors, producer-writers.

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