Auteur

Based on Wikipedia: Auteur

The Director as Author

In 1960, Jerry Lewis—the rubber-faced comedian known for pratfalls and mugging—did something that startled French intellectuals. He directed his own movie.

This wasn't unusual in Hollywood. Plenty of actors had directed before. What caught the attention of critics at Cahiers du Cinéma, the most influential film magazine in the world at that time, was how completely Lewis controlled the production. He wrote the script. He designed the lighting. He supervised the editing. He even handled the art direction. The result was The Bellboy, a nearly plotless comedy set in a Miami Beach hotel.

Jean-Luc Godard, who would soon become one of the most important directors in cinema history, declared Lewis a "personal genius"—"the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn't falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles." French critics compared his visual style to Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.

Americans were baffled. Jerry Lewis? The guy who made faces with Dean Martin?

This collision of highbrow French theory and lowbrow American comedy illuminates something essential about what came to be called auteur theory: the idea that a film director can be the true "author" of a movie in the same way a novelist is the author of a book. The word "auteur" simply means "author" in French, but it carries a weight of meaning that took decades to develop and remains controversial today.

Before the Theory Had a Name

The notion that directors mattered more than other contributors to a film existed long before anyone called it a theory. In the early days of German cinema, the theorist Walter Julius Bloem argued that since filmmaking was a popular art form, the person with the most immediate influence on the final product—the director—naturally became seen as the artist. Everyone else, including the screenwriter, functioned more like an apprentice.

This made intuitive sense. When you watch a play, you might remember the playwright's words, but you experience them through the director's vision—the blocking, the pacing, the lighting, the performances the director coaxed from the actors. Film amplified this relationship exponentially. A director controlled not just what happened on stage but what the audience saw at every moment: which actor's face filled the frame, how long a shot lingered, whether the camera moved or stayed still.

James Agee, perhaps the most respected American film critic of the 1940s, put it simply: "The best films are personal ones, made by forceful directors."

In France, critics André Bazin and Roger Leenhardt went further. They argued that truly great directors didn't just stage scenes competently—they vitalized films with their own worldviews. Through choices about lighting, camera angles, staging, and editing, a director could imprint their personality onto the celluloid as distinctly as a painter's brushstrokes on canvas.

The French New Wave Changes Everything

The real explosion came in 1954, when a young critic named François Truffaut published an essay that would reshape how we think about movies.

Truffaut was writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, a magazine founded just three years earlier that had become a gathering place for passionate young cinephiles—people who didn't just watch movies but studied them obsessively, seeing the same films dozens of times to understand how they worked. Truffaut was twenty-two years old, had no formal film education, and possessed the confidence that comes from caring more about something than almost anyone else alive.

His target was what the French called the "Cinema of Quality"—the respectable, literary adaptations that dominated French filmmaking. These were technically accomplished films based on famous novels, with scripts written by professional screenwriters and directors who faithfully brought those scripts to the screen.

Truffaut found them deadly dull.

He coined a dismissive term for directors who merely executed scripts: metteur en scène, which translates roughly to "stager." A metteur en scène added the performers and the pictures, but contributed nothing personal. They were craftsmen, not artists.

Against this, Truffaut proposed what he called la politique des auteurs—"the policy of authors." Directors who expressed their own personality in their work, who wrote their own scripts or shaped others' scripts to their vision, made better films. These were the true auteurs.

He named eight exemplary writer-directors: Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tati, and Roger Leenhardt. These men didn't just direct movies—they authored them.

Crossing the Atlantic

The idea might have remained a French intellectual curiosity if not for Andrew Sarris.

Sarris was an American film critic writing for Film Culture, a small but influential journal, when he published his 1962 essay "Notes on the Auteur Theory." He translated Truffaut's phrase into English—dropping the "politique" and adding "theory," which gave it a more systematic, academic sound than Truffaut had perhaps intended.

More importantly, Sarris applied the concept to Hollywood.

This was revolutionary. French critics had always maintained a certain fondness for American genre films—they'd been the first to recognize the artistry in directors like Howard Hawks and John Ford—but American intellectuals typically dismissed Hollywood as a factory for entertainment, not art. The studio system, with its producers wielding enormous power and directors often assigned to projects rather than choosing them, seemed to leave no room for personal expression.

Sarris argued the opposite. He looked at the careers of Hollywood directors and found consistent patterns—visual styles, thematic preoccupations, recurring motifs—that persisted across different genres, different studios, different decades. Alfred Hitchcock made thrillers, but his thrillers shared a sensibility you wouldn't find in anyone else's. John Ford made westerns, but his westerns carried an emotional weight distinctly his own.

His 1968 book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, became a kind of Bible for a generation of film students. It ranked Hollywood directors into categories from "Pantheon" (the indisputable greats) down through "Far Side of Paradise," "Expressive Esoterica," and finally the damning "Less Than Meets the Eye." Suddenly, audiences had a new way to think about movies: not just as individual entertainments but as bodies of work expressing individual visions.

The Counterarguments

Not everyone was convinced.

Pauline Kael, Sarris's great rival among American film critics, attacked auteur theory with characteristic ferocity. Her 1971 essay "Raising Kane" examined Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, widely considered the greatest American film ever made, and argued that Welles deserved far less credit than the auteur theory would suggest.

The script, she pointed out, was co-written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, a brilliant Hollywood screenwriter whose contribution was essential. The cinematography came from Gregg Toland, who brought revolutionary deep-focus techniques he'd been developing for years. The film was a collaboration, Kael insisted, and treating Welles as the sole author distorted history.

Other critics extended this argument. Richard Corliss and David Kipen championed the screenwriter's role. In 2006, Kipen coined "Schreiber theory" (from the German word for writer) to argue that screenwriters were the true authors of films.

Film historian Georges Sadoul suggested that a film's main "author" might even be an actor—think of the way Charlie Chaplin's films express his sensibility even when he wasn't directing—or a producer, or even the author of the source novel. Film historian Aljean Harmetz went further, arguing that auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system." In classical Hollywood, producers and executives exercised enormous control. How could directors be authors when they often couldn't choose their own projects?

The New Hollywood and Its Collapse

Whatever the theoretical debates, auteur theory had practical consequences.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of directors emerged who had grown up on Sarris and Cahiers du Cinéma. They didn't just want to make movies—they wanted to make their movies. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Terrence Malick: these filmmakers demanded and received unprecedented creative control.

The studios, reeling from a series of expensive failures with old-fashioned spectacles, were willing to experiment. The result was what came to be called New Hollywood: a brief golden age when directors could take risks, pursue personal visions, and make films that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

The Godfather. Chinatown. Taxi Driver. Nashville. Days of Heaven. These weren't just good movies—they were distinctly authored films, bearing their directors' signatures as clearly as any painting bears a painter's.

It couldn't last.

In 1980, Michael Cimino—fresh off winning the Academy Award for Best Director for The Deer Hunter—released Heaven's Gate. The film was a catastrophe. Originally budgeted at $11 million, it ended up costing $44 million. It ran nearly four hours. Critics savaged it. Audiences stayed away. United Artists, the studio that had given Cimino complete control, was eventually sold.

Heaven's Gate became a symbol of auteur theory run amok: what happens when studios hand directors blank checks and walk away. The lesson Hollywood took was that auteurs needed supervision. The era of director-driven filmmaking gave way to the era of the blockbuster franchise, where directors were expected to serve the property, not vice versa.

The Missing Auteurs

In 2013, filmmaker Maria Giese pointed out something troubling about the pantheon of auteur directors: it was almost exclusively male.

This wasn't because women lacked the ability to create personal, distinctive films. Giese rattled off a list of non-American women directors who clearly qualified as auteurs: Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Liliana Cavani, Claire Denis, Marleen Gorris, Agnieszka Holland, Lynne Ramsay, Agnès Varda, Lina Wertmüller. Several had won major awards. All had developed unmistakable visual and thematic signatures across multiple films.

The problem was access. Women in the United States, Giese argued, were rarely given the financing to make films in the first place. They were rarely afforded proper budgets. At the time she wrote, women made up less than five percent of American feature film directors. By 2016, The Hollywood Reporter reported that only about seven percent of directors among the 250 highest-grossing films were women.

This raised uncomfortable questions about auteur theory itself. If becoming an auteur required the opportunity to develop a body of work over time, and if that opportunity was systematically denied to certain groups, then the auteur pantheon would inevitably reflect those exclusions. The theory might describe something real about how distinctive filmmakers work, but the population of recognized auteurs said as much about industry gatekeeping as about artistic vision.

Beyond Film

The concept of the auteur proved too useful to stay confined to movies.

In music, the first producer to be recognized as an auteur was Phil Spector, who rose to prominence in the early 1960s. Journalist Richard Williams described his approach: "Spector created a new concept: the producer as overall director of the creative process, from beginning to end. He took control of everything, he picked the artists, wrote or chose the material, supervised the arrangements, told the singers how to phrase, masterminded all phases of the recording process with the most painful attention to detail, and released the result on his own label."

Before Spector, producers were largely invisible technicians. After Spector, the idea that a producer could be the true author of a record—that the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds was really Brian Wilson's vision, using the band as his instrument—became commonplace.

Brian Wilson himself, influenced by Spector, became another early pop auteur. In 1962, his band signed to Capitol Records. Within a few years, Wilson had become the first pop musician credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. He used the recording studio itself as an instrument, layering sounds and textures that couldn't be reproduced in live performance.

As Jason Guriel wrote in The Atlantic, Pet Sounds "anticipated later auteurs, as well as the rise of the producer and the modern pop-centric era, which privileges producer over artist and blurs the line between entertainment and art. Anytime a band or musician disappears into a studio to contrive an album-length mystery, the ghost of Wilson is hovering near."

Video games, too, have embraced the auteur concept. Designers like Hideo Kojima—creator of the Metal Gear series—are recognized as authors whose games bear distinctive signatures across decades of work. Like film directors, they oversee massive collaborative projects, but the vision that shapes every element is recognizably their own.

The Legal Auteur

Perhaps the most concrete expression of auteur theory appears in law.

Under European Union copyright law, largely influenced by auteur theory, a film director is considered the film's author—or at least one of its authors. This isn't just philosophical recognition; it confers legal rights. As the author, a director has claims to the work that other contributors don't.

This contrasts with American law, which generally treats films as "works made for hire" owned by the producing studio. The difference reflects different cultural attitudes: Europe took auteur theory seriously enough to build it into law, while America retained a more industrial conception of filmmaking.

The Auteurs Among Us

Today, the word "auteur" gets applied so freely it's almost lost its meaning. Every director with a distinctive visual style gets the label. But certain filmmakers genuinely embody what Truffaut meant.

Wes Anderson's films are so visually distinctive you can identify them from a single frame: the symmetrical compositions, the pastel color palettes, the dollhouse-like production design. Christopher Nolan builds intricate puzzle-box narratives about time and memory. David Lynch creates fever dreams that resist logical interpretation. The Coen brothers craft elaborately stylized worlds that exist nowhere but in their films. Bong Joon-ho weaves social commentary into precisely constructed genre exercises.

These directors work with enormous crews and massive budgets. Their films are as collaborative as any Hollywood production. But somehow, the finished products bear their authorial stamps as clearly as any novel bears its writer's voice.

Maybe that's what auteur theory was always really about: not the ridiculous claim that a director does everything alone, but the observation that in some films—the best films—a single organizing intelligence shapes every element into a coherent whole. The director becomes, in Truffaut's word, an author: someone whose work you can recognize, whose films you can study as an evolving body of thought, whose vision persists across decades and budgets and genres.

Whether that makes Jerry Lewis a genius remains, as the French would say, a matter of policy.