Wes Anderson's Auteur Theory

Wes Anderson is an American film director and screenwriter, whose films are commonly known for their visual and distinctive narrative style. All of his films have been recognised for their extensive use of flat space camera moves, obsessively symmetrical compositions, recurring actors, snap-zooms, slow-motion walking shots, a deliberately limited color palette and hand-made art direction often utilizing miniatures. He uses all these features to define his artistic style as an auteur. Anderson, as an auteur, has demonstrated a master of style with a flair for quick-witted comedy and eccentric characters. Being defined as an artistic being, Anderson’s films have inherited that feel, in the sense that throughout all of his films he has used

An auteur is a director that influences their films so that they can be considered as an author. Quentin Tarantino is considered an author through his unique directorial film style, examples of Tarantino’s directorial film style are; his use of camera work especially with extreme close-ups, bloody violence, and long drawn-out scenes. We have studied Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained, as well as Tarantino’s first box office movie Reservoir Dogs to analyse.

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.

The auteur theory commonly used within Hitchcock’s limits his films from being seen within a larger set of films that were produced during the same period, rather they are taken as part of a collect as his work. This theory discourages the study of Hitchcock’s films as part of a larger grouping or style such as film noir. Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) fills both the roles of a film noir and a Hitchcockian thriller, leading to the conclusion that the genres or film types share more than they diverge.

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.

This report was exploring different aspects of Christopher Nolan's films to determine why he is an auteur. Throughout all of his movies, he uses similar techniques such as dark driving forces for his protagonists. He also uses unclear and twisted plots causing the audience to be misdirected. And finally, the use of non-linear timelines to explore different aspects of his characters.

“… As far as I know, there is no definition of the auteur theory in the English language, that is, by an American or British critic” (Sarris 1962) was the opening line to Andrew Sarris’s famous “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” essay. This essay is what brought the “auteur theory” in to the spotlight in the USA. And to today, this theory is still in hot debate. Trying to figure out whether or not the director is the lone “auteur” of a film is a tough claim to make. In an article for Slate Magazine, Doree Shafrir talks about why a writer cannot be an auteur in “Bored of Directors.” In his film blog, Fredrik Fevang posted an article about misconceptions of auteur theory critics titled “Dan Schneider and James Berardinelli's misconception

Throughout history, films were known to be iconic and relevant to a certain genre. In each genre, you can pull out different directors that created pathways and opened doors that highlighted and chronically pinpointed eras of filmmaking. However, directors tend to blend genres over their career, but still pave ways for proceeding directors. One director, Stanley Kubrick, specialized in imaginative films that involved images beyond what was real. His genre focused on surrealism and horror, while using characters emotions to drive the stories. A director that was influenced by Kubrick’s filmmaking was David Lynch. Not only did Kubrick break barriers with his controversial films like Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork

The question at hand states, “In evaluating a film, should we interpret and evaluate it by considering how the film is the creative work of a single author or auteur?” (Yenter, “Essay Information”). Understanding my claim requires an understanding of what an auteur is. The original “auteur theory” is the idea that the director is the sole author of the film. There are three different strategies that are typically used to argue for the theory of single authorship.

The concept behind the Auteur Theory suggests the artist have complete control over their artistic vision as a result of the writer and/or director working outside of the studio system in an arthouse context. In classical Hollywood, the director was essentially an employee often with limited control over the types of film they made, strips they had and casts they worked with (Thomas, AJ. 2015). The Auteur Theory becomes a challenging concept for the director him/herself. Within that context, the idea of expressing a personal vision becomes more complex as the director has more of a limited capacity over controlling the elements to make that vision. Authorship in this sense is the idea of how the director expresses that perspective within the

Andrew Sarris, a renowned film critic, clarified the Auteur Theory to be the notion that “the way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels,” and that “good directors express style and theme across their body of work,” (Stam 89; Sampson, Lecture 8.2). Although director Jonathan Glazer has a diverse body of work, his personal themes and style are able to shine through across all visual mediums, thus proving him to be a good director, according to Andrew Sarris’s interpretation of the Auteur Theory. In his “Odyssey” commercial for Levi Strauss, his music video for “Rabbit in Your Headlights” by Unkle, and his film Birth, the combination of his themes of persistence and unclear identities, along with his style of capturing people’s faces and use of tracking shots reveals his worldview that human beings are complex and strong entities.

Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen explore the principles of genre in their book Film Theory and Criticism. Braudy and Cohen write that the most common criticism is that, ”Genre art… can never reach the heights of greatness because its creators are too tied to artistic precedents and are therefore not ‘original’”(607). Restrictions of genre destroy the individual artist or what is known as the “auteur” in film. Creativity and uniqueness is sacrificed for conformity in narrative, production, and societal issues. According to this criticism, genre films cannot be considered works of art and directors are not artists, but mere pawns of the studio system.

It is interesting to examine the work of Howard Hawks and Martin Scorsese together because their directorial careers and attitudes to filmmaking contain some interesting comparisons and contrasts. Both men are widely considered to be among the auteur directors of the cinema. Hawks was said to be "both bemused and gratified" by the attention his work received when re-evaluated in line with la politique des auteurs but he considered himself to be a storyteller, as opposed to an artist of any kind, and did not believe his films should be considered as pieces of art (McBride, 5). Scorsese is a director who is more conscious of being an artist or auteur filmmaker owing to his academic training in the study of cinema before he began to make films.

The application of this idea to Barthes’ work is in the very essence of the

We watched five films created by five different and unique auteurs. The three I am going to talk about are Alfred Hitchcock, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Spike Lee. I think each of these three directors are auteurs and I am going to give a few examples of how they are. First and foremost, all three of these directors have styles that are very similar throughout their movies. For Hitchcock’s movies, there seems to always be a suspense theme added to his films. He has a way of making the audience see or infer what is going to happen and create that feeling of the audience wanting to