Origin in 1965 Even before auteur theory, the director was considered the most important influence on a film. In Germany, an early film theorist,
Walter Julius Bloem, explained that since filmmaking is an art geared toward popular culture, a film's immediate influence, the director, is viewed as the artist, whereas an earlier contributor, like the screenwriter, is viewed as an apprentice.
James Agee, a leading film critic of the 1940s, said that "the best films are personal ones, made by forceful directors".
François Truffaut criticized the prevailing "Cinema of Quality" whereby directors, faithful to the script, merely adapt a literary novel. Truffaut described such a director as a
metteur en scene, a mere "stager" who adds the performers and pictures. To represent the view that directors who express their personality in their work make better films, Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des auteurs", or "the policy of the authors". He named eight writer-directors,
Jean Renoir,
Robert Bresson,
Jean Cocteau,
Jacques Becker,
Abel Gance,
Max Ophüls,
Jacques Tati, and
Roger Leenhardt, as examples of these "authors".
Popularization and influence As early as his 1962 essay "Notes on the auteur theory", published in the journal
Film Culture, American film critic
Andrew Sarris translated the French term
la politique des auteurs, by
François Truffaut in 1955, into Sarris's term
auteur theory. Sarris applied it to Hollywood films, and elaborated in his 1968 book,
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, which helped popularize the English term. Via auteur theory, critical and public scrutiny of films shifted from their stars to the overall creation. when studios granted directors more leeway to take risks. Yet in the 1980s, upon high-profile failures like ''
Heaven's Gate'', studios reasserted control, muting the auteur theory.
Commercial and blockbuster auteurs While the term "auteur" is commonly applied to
highbrow and
critically acclaimed directors, there are examples of commercial filmmakers with a distinctive style who have been labelled as auteurs. Director and producer
Michael Bay, for instance, was described by Peter Suderman, from
Vox, as a "subversive cinematic auteur". According to Suderman, "few filmmakers are as stylistically consistent as Bay, who recycles many of the same shots, editing patterns, and color schemes in nearly all of his films", which have the commonality of heavy use of
special effects,
computer-generated imagery and explosions, down to its color palettes and filters, which retain a pattern of "neon color contrasts (especially teal and orange)" while "his movies often appear to take place in a perpetual magic hour, with moody sunsets and sunrises looming in the background". As such, despite the mixed and negative reviews of many of Bay's films, Suderman sums up his filmmaking in being consistently "big, loud, and dumb", which makes him a "subversive auteur". Another example of an auteur of commercial films is American actor, comedian and filmmaker
Adam Sandler, who, according to the Bijou Film Board of the
University of Iowa, "has curated a catalog of comedies that bear a signature arguably as recognizable as that of an auteur director", whose point of focus of his filmography is "the value of family and friends". In fact, according to Ethan McGuire from
The Dispatch, even when "he was neither a husband nor a father", he "was reflecting seriously on what that should mean". Along with being a director and producer, Sandler also is an example of an actor auteur, who has starred on his films alongside character actors who are known for being recurringly cast in his movies, such as
Kevin James,
Allen Covert, and
Jonathan Loughran.
Criticism Pauline Kael, an early critic of auteur theory, debated Andrew Sarris in magazines. Defending a film as a collaboration, her 1971 essay "
Raising Kane", examined
Orson Welles's 1941 film
Citizen Kane, asserting extensive reliance on co-writer
Herman J. Mankiewicz and on cinematographer
Gregg Toland.
Richard Corliss and
David Kipen argued that a film's success relies more on screenwriting. In 2006, to depict the screenwriter as the film's principal author, Kipen coined the term
Schreiber theory. To film historian
Georges Sadoul, a film's main "author" can also be an actor, screenwriter, producer, or novel's author, although a
film is a collective's work. Film historian
Aljean Harmetz, citing classical Hollywood's input by producers and executives, held that auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the
studio system".
Law In some law references, a film is treated as artwork while the auteur, as its creator, is the original copyright holder. Under
European Union law, largely by influence of auteur theory, a film director is considered the film's author or one of its authors. == Popular music ==