Auteur Theory 1

How auteur theory can be applied to the study of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Vertigo

An auteur is a director who personal creative vision and style is expressed through films. The term auteur is originated in France and is French for author. There are different ways in which a director can express their vision in films and show who they are. There are many directors that are considered to be a auteur such as: Quentin Tarintino, Tim Burton, Kathryn Bigelow, Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen. The director I have chosen as an auteur is Spike Lee.

Smith has taken everyday occurrences, added humor and a bit of obscenity and crafted them into scripts. Smith has then taken these scripts and directed, and produced full-length films in which he also acted. After the film was fully shot, Smith then edited all of his films (with the exception of “Mallrats”). Because of all of the work that Smith single-handedly put into his independent films that ended up drawing a huge crowd of fans, he can surely be called an auteur.

What exactly is an auteur? According to Graham Roberts and Heather Wallis, ‘film’s generic ideas produced creative conventions in cinema language which could then be exploited and developed by individual artists into a personal vision’ (127). That individual artist is the auteur; someone who, through their work, displays several key qualities that are uniquely their own, namely: reoccurring themes and plotlines throughout their movies; specific stylistic qualities in their films such as mise en scene and cinematography styles; similar character attributes and traits; and narrative structure and features (Roberts and Wallis 128). Throughout cinema’s history, only several directors have ever been referred to as an ‘auteur’. Some names that are

Anyone who is even vaguely aware with film usually has a favorite director. Why? What distinguishes one director from another? A director is “the person who determines and realizes on the screen an artistic vision of the screenplay; casts the actors and directs their performances; works closely with production design in creating the look of the film…and in most cases, supervises all postproduction activity, especially editing” (Barsam and Monahan 496). Clearly, the director of a film is lead visionary in how the film is made. But what makes some directors truly memorable and instantly recognizable? Those directors take advantage of all different kinds creative possibilities and signatures to become the true “author” of the film, also known

As one of the most widely acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era, Stanley Kubrick enjoyed a reputation and a standing unique among the filmmakers of his day. He had a brilliant career with relatively few films. An outsider, he worked beyond the confines of Hollywood, which he disliked, maintaining complete control of his projects and making movies according to his own ideas and time constraints. To him, filmmaking was a form of art and unlike Hollywood, not a business.

Alfred Hitchcock is arguably the greatest director of all time. Many of his films are considered standards of American cinema and inspired many of today’s directors. Even though Hitchcock is known as timeless director, he had an understanding of philosophy that was beyond his time. Hitchcock had a brilliant perception as to how the mind works and human reaction. Hitchcock’s understanding of philosophy can be seen in his film Vertigo and illustrates how many theories can be debilitating in everyday life.

The term Auteur seems to bless a privileged group of filmmakers with an almost messiah-like legacy. Men such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Fritz Lange are believed to inhabit the ranks of the cinematic elite, and not surprisingly most critics are more than willing to bestow upon them the title of Auteur. By regarding filmmaking as yet another form of art, Auteur theory stipulates that a film is the direct result of its director's genius. With the emerging prominence of auteur based criticism in the 1950?s, the role of the director became increasingly integral to a film's success. However most would argue that this form of criticism didn't reach its apex until 1960s, when Andrew Sarris released his

Many people may have a specific style in which they like to dress. A woman might have a signature lipstick she enjoys wearing, a man might have a distinct cologne that stands out from the rest. Movies are not too far apart in comparison. Sometimes people find films more enjoyable than others, and often do not realize they come from the same director. The Auteur theory is a that defines the director as the sole author of the entire film, adding his or her own personal style. When it comes to the world of animation, director Hayao Miyazaki is a pioneer in auteur. His specific directorial style is seen in many of his films in which he manages to make films enjoyable to adults of all ages. Kiki's Delivery Service was one of director Miyazaki's

An auteur is a filmmaker whose movies are characterized by their creative influence. Garry Marshall is an American filmmaker, he has directed more than 15 films in his career. Garry Marshall’s films The Princess Diaries, Valentines Day and Overboard share a common theme of love and a genre of romance and comedy, he likes to use the same actors in his films and have the common plot of a double twist. Garry Marshall likes to keep to the same character persona and film techniques but these generalized similarities are not obvious to the audience, therefore Garry Marshall is not a recognizable Auteur.

The auteur theory is best described as a director taking the role of author. Auteur comes from a French word, meaning author or originator. Just as a reader can detect patterns in written works of the same author, viewers can detect patterns in films directed by the same director(s), if they’re auteurists. They control as many aspects of the film as they can in order to fully embed it with their vision. The Coen brothers do just that; they, down to the writing of the script, work to control many of the elements of their films. The patterns and style, though with slight alterations with time, carry over in their many works. Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), though almost ten years apart, still adhere quite strongly to the same patterns and style typical of the Coen brothers.

Perhaps no other director has generated such a broad range of critical reaction as D.W. Griffith. For students of the motion picture, Griffith's is the most familiar name in film history. Generally acknowledged as America's most influential director (and certainly one of the most prolific), he is also perceived as being among the most limited. Praise for his mastery of film technique is matched by repeated indictments of his moral, artistic, and intellectual inadequacies. At one extreme, Kevin Brownlow has characterized him as "the only director in America creative enough to be called a genius." At the other, Paul Rotha calls his contribution to the advance of film "negligible" and Susan Sontag complains of his "supreme vulgarity and even

Auteur Theory is based on three premises, the first being technique, the second being personal style, and the third being interior meaning. Furthermore, there is no specific order in which these three aspects must be presented or weighted with regard to a film. An Auteur must give films a distinctive quality thus exerting a personal creative vision and interjecting it into the his or her films.

Barthes claims that the author is dead (Barthes, 1977: 208), a theoretical construction that perceives the director as an idea, whereas, Bazin’s principle method establishes cinematic realism.

When it comes to movies, many directors are good at their jobs. However, other directors are great in the art of film making. There is no doubt such statement is considered utterly subjective, but what would life be without subjectivity, for it is our differences that make us thrive against a monotonic existence. By the same token, Alfred Hitchcock and Christopher Nolan utilize their singularities to create films that for decades have impacted the movie making universe. In fact, it is their differences that provide us with a high contrast to compare and scrutinize their job and find what made them great at it.