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The Influence Of The Film Auteur

Decent Essays

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies, authorship is defined as ‘an approach to film analysis and criticism that focuses on the ways in which the personal influence, individual sensibility, and artistic vision of a film’s director might be identified in their work’ (Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell 2012:25). The theory at the root of this concept, was first developed in France, in the 1950s, under the name of politique des auteurs, by director and critic François Truffaut, in his illustrious essay A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema (1954), originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma. Throughout this article, Truffaut sided against metteurs en scène, considered mere technicians, affirming that filmmakers should rather be auteurs …show more content…

Style constitutes, thus, a key concept in the theory. Therefore, through the years, the politique’s critics have perfected a precise definition of the term, ultimately describing it as the unique cinematic expression of ‘the auteur’s personality, [which] endows his work with organic unity’ (Edward Buscombe 2008:78) and, as I will explain later, elevates it to the status of art. On a practical level, auteur style is hence embodied, in the filmmaker’s work, by easily distinguishable visual, aural or narrative patterns, on one hand, and, by recurrent personal themes, on the …show more content…

However, the fundamental subjects of the oeuvre are no more than four. As Kieslowski himself declared: ‘all my films, […] are about individuals […] who don’t quite know how to live’ (1993:79). It is hence clear, that the theme of individuality is essential in the director’s work. In fact, even though his pictures deal with highly debated issues such as death penalty and the universal values of liberty, equality and fraternity, they are only concerned with them ‘on a very human, intimate and personal plane and not a philosophical […] a political or social one’ (Kieslowski and Stok 1993:212). Indeed, the director’s chief interests are the feelings and emotions of his characters, the exploration of their interiority and of their quest to find meaning in life, thus the melancholic contemplative mood of films such as Blue and Red.
In line with the motif of individuality, is the theme of loneliness. All the protagonists of Kieslowski’s pictures are alone and isolated, often because they have experienced an emotional trauma, such as abandonment – as in A Short Film About Love - or the loss of a loved one – as in Blue. They live in big cities, like Paris and Warsaw, but are nonetheless unable to truly connect with others, and limit themselves to observing life with a voyeuristic

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