Auteurism In The Dark Knight

The main conflicts in the world of The Dark Knight Returns revolve around escalating crime in Gotham city and forces of the authority attempting to control it. The authority should be a moral force and represent justice. The figures that represent the authority should be selfless and work only to promote the integrity of law and order. Authority proves to be contradictory in Miller’s novel as the authoritative figures express qualities of vigilantism and overall moral ambiguity.

The Joker was once seen as a comical criminal who committed ridiculously silly crimes, such as spreading laughing gas throughout Gotham City. However, after the reinvention of Batman, The Joker was transformed into a grave and terrorizing character. Continuing the course of the new personality given to The Joker, writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland created a graphic novel called The Killing Joke, “a much more complex, darker, and ultimately, frightening story” (Wooldridge) which tells one of the origins of The Joker since The Joker himself is unsure of his true inception. However, this particular graphic novel “isn’t about how the Joker came to be, it’s an examination of

In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.

Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded as a prime example of an auteur, a theory that emerged in the 1950s by Truffaut, in the ‘politique des auteurs’ of Cahiers du Cinema (Tudor 121). The auteur theory, as defined by Andrew Tudor, is premised on the assumption that “any director creates his films on the basis of a central structure”(140) and thus, if you consider their films in relation to each other, commonalities can be found within them. These commonalities work to demonstrate the view of the director as “the true creator of the film” (Tudor 122). Evidence of an auteur can be found in examining a director’s creative tendencies, in their distinctive themes and motifs, stylistic choices,

In 1962, an American film critic, Andrew Sarris, wrote the “notes on the auteur theory.” He stated that the “first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of

Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, wants to give in, but is torn. He is at a point of conflict between true immediate protection of the city by showing himself, and not giving in so that he can continue to serve. The twist comes when, just as Wayne decides that he must comply and let the truth out, Harvey Dent proclaims that he is Batman. At first this works but then the Joker starts killing people

The Dark Knight is about a city hero, known as the “Batman” of Gotham City. He fights crime, in or outside the city limits as long as it pertains to Gotham City, in other words “the batman has no jurisdiction”. In the film Gordon, the police commissioner of Gotham City, Batman, and Harvey Dent the district attorney for Gotham team up to take down the mob and the Joker.

In a movie where good and evil are divided by a very thin line, the Dark Knight rises up to fight against injustice and corruption in Gotham City. An action sequel to the original Batman Begins, this installment is a lot darker filled with more explosion, twists, and suspense. For the first time, a comic has been integrated into the issues of the real world. With the help of District Attorney Harvey Dent and Lieutenant Gordon, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining mob members and clean the streets of Gotham for good. Their success is only short-lived when they encounter the Joker, a mysterious mastermind who is out to prove that nobility cannot hold in a world of anarchy.

The city in Gotham is in chaos. They no longer know what they stand for and are starting to wonder if fighting evil is, in fact, creating more evil. One man who stands strong even when the public is second-guessing is Harvey Dent played by Aaron Eckhart. He is the new district attorney and is respected by the entire city for stopping corruption all over the town. He is a clean-shaven man with blonde hair and blue eyes who presents himself as a very proper man. This mise en scene proves that this man is a good man. If he were unshaven, had dark eyes, and dark hair it would be hard to consider him a truly good man. The director realizes this may not be true with everyone but it is a typical stereotype in our society today. As the movie goes on the enemy, who is forcing him to second-guess his values, tests him time and time again. Being an honest man is no longer putting criminals away; they are always one step ahead. By the end of the film, the Joker crushes Harvey’s values and blinds him from what his true goals were in life. His two-sided face shows this visually after being burned in the explosion. Also, Harvey has a coin with a head printed on both sides. This coin never can land on tails but Harvey

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

The artistic representation of the Batman myth is an important cultural artifact of our time because it represents modern society's thirst for heroic ideals in popular entertainment. Since his creation, readers and viewers have admired Batman's unique ability to battle villainy, transcend the law and administer justice. As cultivators of the noir genre in film as well as in literature, Americans have always identified with this enigmatic hero, who exists on the margins of society and yet represents one of the largest corporations in the world. The evolution of Batman in particular and the superhero genre in general (from comic book to television to film and back again) has seen in the latest adaptation from Christopher Nolan's Batman revamp a veritable tilting point for the character once known as the World's Greatest Detective. This paper will analyze why Batman is an important cultural artifact of our day, how he came into being, what he means for society, and how he will be treated in the future.

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.

Christian Bale plays Bruce Wayne also known as Batman, the protagonist who protects the citizens of Gotham City, but at the same time throughout the movie he is forced to be in difficult situations and has to make difficult decisions. At the same time the police department considers him a vigilante, because Batman acts outside of the law fighting crime differently. The Dark Knight is a plot of a classical paradigm film, but it has some aspect of formalism. In Understanding Movies -13th Edition, “Formalist movies are stylistically flamboyant. Their directors are concerned with expressing their subjective

"The Dark Knight" is grimly magisterial. It's a summer blockbuster that contemplates near-total civic disaster: Crowds surge, tractor-trailers flip, and buildings explode, but the pop violence feels heavy, mournful. Light barely escapes the film's gravitational pull.

With the roots of cinema as an entity deeply embodied in Europe, cinema in France was becoming less and less prominent in the 1950s leaving it in dire need of resuscitation. Meanwhile, the idea of auteurship was fast becoming established in Hollywood because it effectively conferred directors that worked with restriction on their material a somewhat lesser recognition and creative freedom in films. This formulaic approach to cinema was successful yet exhaustive as the same story patterns and effectively the same actors and directors were used through the economic resources that were at their exposal. The system effectively degraded the director’s personal style and stamp on the films they produced, a problem later remedied with the introduction of the auteur policy. The monopolization approach of Hollywood meant particular individual films were bound for box office success and others less so.