Exploring the Auteur Theory in Film

Hi everyone, welcome. This is a Film Studies channel. We're going to be talking to you about all things related to the study of films and the video today is going to be on the auteur theory. I should probably get this out of the way now. There are going to be lots of French words that I'm going to be saying in this video and I don't speak French and my pronunciation of French isn't great so I apologize in advance to anybody who does speak French and is watching this video so the Oto Theory is going to come up if you're studying the EDUCAST A-level film it's going to come up on component one section A the one on Hollywood comparison and also on component two, section D, on experimental film. So it bookends the two exams. Really, Oto Theory, when we talk to fellow film fans about our favourite directors, or if we see a film poster that mentions the director or in the trailer, or if we see things like box sets, which are dedicated to a particular director. Or even if we see seasons on, say, the BFI, which are dedicated to a particular director. That's all basically partly in thanks to the auteur theory. Before we get into what the auteur theory is, I'm just going to say that the word theory is in there for a reason. It's not the only way to study films. It's just a way to study films. And there are lots and lots of people. who disagree with the auteur theory as a way of discussing and studying films. We'll talk about one of those today. And it's just one of many critical approaches. And obviously, you'll be using lots of critical approaches on the exam, like narrative and ideology. Auteur theory is just one way that you can look at films. It's just one of the many critical approaches. So where does it begin? Auteur theory is widely credited as originating from a French writer and eventually film director, a guy called Francois Truffaut. So he was at the time. I'm writing for a magazine. called Cahiers du Cinéma, along with other famous film academics, critics, writers, André Bazin, and also another fellow film director, Jean-Luc Godard. And he wrote an essay called A Certain Tendency of French Cinema. He spends quite a lot of this essay just ripping into directors that he doesn't like. And the directors that he doesn't like, he refers to these directors as metas en scène. And a meta en scène is basically a director who's tech- Technically fine, you know, make okay films, nothing to kind of criticize them for in terms of the way they've been put together. But they're just a bit bland, a bit voiceless. There's no individual personality that stands out to the viewer as he watches them. And he said this belongs to a tradition of quality. these types of films he said they're all part of this tradition of quality that is common in French films and he was not a big fan of tradition in fact he would later go on to become a director as part of the French New Wave so you can see you know New Wave obviously doesn't sound very traditional does it and his biggest sort of bugbear was when these directors these metas on scene were taking novels or taking scripts that were written by another script writer and just doing a very faithful adaptation of that source from page to screen and he was saying what's the point in that really if you want to just see a novel turn into the film why don't you just read the novel? The novel's there already. The whole point of cinema is that we're bringing something new to it and it's the director's job to do that. So if he didn't like those types of directors, these metas on the scene, what did he like? And the answer is auteurs. He refers to them as auteurs. And auteur is the French word for author. And we obviously, when we think about that in English-speaking countries, we think about someone who writes novels. Generally speaking, writing a novel is a solitary practice. It's something that you do on your own. And if you look at a novel by... say um feodor dostoevsky or something like that it's very clear that they're the author of that novel and there might be other people who might help them out along the way but it's their novel okay and that is what um truffaut felt the director should do they should have the same amount of creative control and the same amount of influence over a film as an author a novelist does over a book so along with having that sort of full creative control over the film what an author needed to do according to truffaut was they needed to show themselves up on the screen they need to expose themselves their vulnerabilities so not literally being on the screen but in terms of their soul if you like so all of their fears their anxieties their hopes their dreams all of this should be laid bare on the screen for the audience to see and in showing that to the audience it would enable the audience to better understand their own fears and dreams and hopes and anxieties okay and that for Truffaut was the um ultimate mark of quality for a piece of art and we'll get onto criticisms of auteur theory in a moment but just to kind of say a couple of nice kind words about Truffaut and Cahiers de Cinéma and the writers of that really for them they were amongst the first to really make the case that film could be or was an art form and should be held in the same regard as great works of literature or amazing you know works of art paintings and stuff like that you know If film is an art form, then filmmakers were therefore artists and they should be respected and treated as such, hence the auteur theory. And if it weren't for magazines like Cahiers du Cinéma and it wasn't for people like Truffaut, etc., championing cinema as an art form, we probably wouldn't be studying it now in schools and sixth forms in universities. So Truffaut wrote... A Certain Tendency of French Cinema, I think in 1953, it was published in 1954, something like that. Cut to just, you know, about eight years later and you've got Andrew Sarris, an American film critic, and he wrote an essay article called notes on the auteur theory in 1962 and saris sort of said the auteur theory is great but it's a little bit woolly we need to firm it up we need to give a bit more of a shape so what saris did and this was his development of the auteur theory was he said that directors had to do three things in order to be considered an auteur okay and he sets it up as like circles so you've got the outer circle um which is technical competence that's the first thing they have to do and then the second circle which is a distinguishable personality or recurring characteristics and then the final one uh to get to the bullseye in the center of it to be considered an auteur is interior meaning so let's talk about those three so technical competence uh what sarah said by that is that in order to be considered a great director you had to be at least a good director so you need to know how to work all the you know camera equipment you need to have to structure a film's narrative tell stories that kind of stuff okay so that's the first thing if you can do that then you can get considered eligible for the second one and this is the one that a lot of people kind of think about and think about auteur theory and he said they had to have a distinguishable personality and basically that means that there needs to be recurring motifs or characteristics things that the director keeps doing over a body of work okay and this is what you know lots and lots of directors do then um and really since you know saris has said this i think a lot of directors have purposely kind of gone for that in order to be considered auteurs um and you can see it in the 70s with that kind of you know american um new hollywood thing with like scorsese and francis ford coppola and stuff also in the 90s um and up to you know today so films that are very easily recognizable as being made by that director is a really good um example of this second characteristic so if we look at you know one of the most obvious ones people point to would be something like Wes Anderson so you know Wes Anderson he always has that sort of central shot composition he uses that kind of pastel color palette I guess you would say you know very deliberately constructed you know almost a flat look to his films in terms of the aesthetic but it's not just to do with the aesthetic that you know the look of the film or the feel of the film it's also to do with things like directors might have particular themes they keep revisiting or particular narrative structures or particular character types. So, you know, obvious ones for that would be something like Hitchcock, you know, loves voyeurism, puts out in a lot of his films. In terms of his narratives, they quite often start in disequilibrium or have a very short equilibrium in terms of characters. You know, the cool blonde for one. Also, you know, the wrong man character, that kind of stuff. So these are all things that would be part of Hitchcock's distinguishable personality and make him eligible for that second circle. And the final and third circle in order to become an auteur, that last criteria, is what Saris refers to as interior meaning. It's a little bit vague, I think, a little bit woolly what he means by this. But the phrase he uses is where the meaning of the film is created from the tension between the director's personality and the source material. So I think this is kind of a run on from what Truffaut was saying in the... The director's personality should trump the source material, it should transcend that, and the film should be about the director as personality, as opposed to, you know, doing a faithful adaptation of a script or a book. Okay, right, so the next addition to the auteur theory was a British film writer, critic, academic, called Peter Wallen. He wrote a book in, I think it was 1969, called Signs and Meaning. or maybe meaning and signs. And in it, he sets out a league table of directors, okay? So you've got the lower rungs, and they're like, okay, and then you've got the good ones, and you've got the really good ones. And then at the very, very top of this league table of directors, you've got what he refers to as the pantheon, okay? And the pantheon are, for him, the ultimate auteurs. And in that, you've got lots of familiar names. So you've got Orson Welles. who I believe is one of the component one section a lady Shanghai's in there you've got Alfred Hitchcock you've also got Charlie Chaplin you've got John Ford you've got Ernst Lubitsch loads of directors well not loads probably about 12 or 13 and something like that okay and what's interesting about Wallen's pantheon is in it he really kind of sets out who the the canon of the great directors and the great works are for film studies and lots of kind of people from that point on would look at those and would say, like, you know, these are the great films, if you like, in the same way that, like, in English lit, you know, the canon would be full of people like Shakespeare, for example. Let's move on to criticisms of the auteur theory. And for that, we're really going to be focusing on one film critic, and that is the legend. Pauline Kael okay so Pauline Kael also an American film critic she read Saris's notes on auteur theory and she did not like it one bit so what Pauline Kael did was she wrote a rebuttal article called circles and squares in which she basically just like tears strips of Andrew Saris and it's a bit like sort of the film critic equivalent of a rap battle and she just says like everything he says is idiotic the first one technical competence she says that one is done because She says that technical competence, and this I think she's a bit in agreement with Truffaut, and she said technical competence doesn't necessarily make for good films. In fact, it can make for quite bland films. So, you know, a filmmaker might make technically competent films, but there's no innovation there. And because there's no innovation, there's no uniqueness, there's no artistry. Hence, you cannot be considered an auteur, all right, or a great director or a maker of great films, at least. So she said in order for film to kind of be considered an art form, you need to get people who are going to break the rules. And they're not going to do that if... if they're kind of following the technical competence thing of what directors should do. Second one, the distinguishable personality, the repeated characteristics across films. So this is a really good one. She says, you know, when did repetition become a good thing? Okay, so one of her quotes in it is something along the lines of, repetition without development is decline. The idea that if you keep doing the same thing and not developing or not moving forward, you're basically going downhill as a... filmmaker um and she said you know it's the equivalent of praising um a garment um or uh you know a technical product like a phone for whatever because of the the label that made it okay so like you know if you've got a calvin klein suit you know saying this is a great suit because it's calvin klein or because you've got the latest apple iphone you're saying it's a great phone because it's apple okay you're paying for the label in those instances and she's saying doesn't know necessarily make it great she said when the film is good we focus on the film when the film is bad we because of the auteur theory we focus on the person who makes it and we say well it must be great because alfred hitchcock made it okay and this is quite interesting because you know and to be fair um this is one of the things about the auteur theory which i think is a little bit but true foe um in an interview said something along the lines of a paraphrasing here an unsuccessful film by an auteur is always more interesting more worth considering over a film by someone who's not an auteur, even great films maybe. So that's kind of interesting. And I do wonder if that's the case. So something like Vertigo, for example, when Vertigo came out, it didn't get very good reviews. There's a famous one in Variety. And I think the writer of this Variety review said something like, you know, Alfred Hitchcock here is repeating himself again, but this time in slow motion. The idea that he's doing something that he's done before, but just not as well, not as successfully. But because of... I think the auteur theory, because of books like that Hitchcock Truffaut one and stuff like that, lots of people kind of kept going back to Vertigo and give it a second and a third and a fourth watch because, you know, it's Alfred Hitchcock, so it must be good, right? And now, you know, Vertigo is considered the greatest film of all time, according to, you know, the Science Sound Poll, and it is considered one of his masterpieces. Were it not for the auteur theory, I don't think people would be saying that about it. It probably would have been forgotten. You could make the case. I don't know. Maybe that's controversial, but there we go. And the third one, the interior meaning one, she says, you know, this again is ridiculous. Why would it be a good thing for a director to be in conflict or for there to be tension between the director and the source material? Surely the best film is going to be one where the director and the source material are working in harmony together to bring out the best of both. So that's her criticisms of Andrew Sarris. It's pretty savage. It's definitely worth a read. Circles and squares. And then a couple of years later, I'm not quite sure when, she wrote an essay. about Citizen Kane called Raising Kane okay and Citizen Kane is directed by Orson Welles and lots of people say again before Vertigo toppled it off the sight and sound poll Citizen Kane was considered the greatest film ever made and people were saying the reason why it's so great is because Orson Welles had loads and loads of creative control okay the studio just said you go make the film do what you want to do and he made this this film and you know Orson Welles co-wrote it stars in it and directed it but she's saying a lot of the things that people praise Citizen Kane for you know the the writing, the narrative structure of it, and the cinematography, the fact that Orson Welles does stuff where he shoots to the ceiling, and there's all these great bits of deep focus and stuff in there. So a lot of that stuff that people are praising for and accrediting to Welles and saying this is why he's such a great filmmaker is actually due to other people who worked on the film. Joseph Mankiewicz co-wrote the script of Citizen Kane. So he's got to get credited for it. And Greg Tolland, all that amazing deep focus photography that people are loving in Citizen Kane, that's because of the... the cinematographer Greg Todland. So this is a big problem with the Oter theory is that, you know, it doesn't acknowledge... the significant contributions that all of the other people who worked on that film we can look at things like Hitchcock you know you've got Bernard Herrmann you've got Edith Head um you know with uh Blade Run you've got Vangelis you've got Sid Mead you know not to mention the actors in these films you know James Stewart and you know Harrison Ford all these other people working on these films do they not have an influence on how the film turns out and then the last one and I unfortunately I don't have sort of a person to to credit with this one although I'm sure lots of people have said it but the problem with the OTA theory and you can see this in wallen's pantheon and also you can see it in the essays written by trufo and saris because they refer to the director as he throughout and if you look at wallen's pantheon they're all men and also they're all white as well when we look at things like the oscars we're still seeing you know this massive massive imbalance towards white men if you google the list of non-white directors to win best director at the oscars it is you pitifully small so I think there have been 455 nominations for Best Director of that only 5 of them were women, only 13 of them were people of colour And from the 92 winners that we've had of the Best Director, this is in 2020, making this video, one woman has won the Best Director Oscar, Catherine Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. Only two of the winners have been people of colour. And one of those was this year, Bong Joon-ho for Parasite. So, you know, the Ota theory and that canon, that pantheon that Wallen has set up might be one of the problems with, you know, the institutional sexism and racism of Hollywood, perhaps. so to summarize then the auteur theory uh francois truffaut said the best directors the ones who put their soul up on screen um and show their vulnerability and their fears and their anxiety according to andrew saris in order to be an auteur you had to be technically competent have a distinguishable personality and your films had to have interior meaning in terms of criticisms uh pauline cow in particular she's the one who takes against andrew saris and she said that technical competence isn't always great because it makes for boring bland filmmaking uh distinguishable person personality isn't good either because it's just repeating yourself and repeating yourself is not a good thing you should develop and lastly interior meaning that's stupid too because why would it be a good thing for a director to be in conflict to have tension between them and the source of material it should be working together her other big thing obviously as well is that film is a collaborative process so to you know the whole idea of you know one person having the greatest influence over a film is stupid because you've got so many people who work on a film to kind of just pinpoint it on one director it's to disregard the collaborative nature of filmmaking that's what makes it so unique and so great compared to other types of creative endeavors okay and final criticism is obviously that um the whole otter theory is just a bit of a white men's club so that's this video for otter theory at some point in the future i'm going to do another couple of videos where we apply otter theory to blade runner and to vertigo thanks very much bye

So it bookends the two exams. Really, Oto Theory, when we talk to fellow film fans about our favourite directors, or if we see a film poster that mentions the director or in the trailer, or if we see things like box sets, which are dedicated to a particular director. Or even if we see seasons on, say, the BFI, which are dedicated to a particular director. That's all basically partly in thanks to the auteur theory.

Before we get into what the auteur theory is, I'm just going to say that the word theory is in there for a reason. It's not the only way to study films. It's just a way to study films. And there are lots and lots of people.

who disagree with the auteur theory as a way of discussing and studying films. We'll talk about one of those today. And it's just one of many critical approaches. And obviously, you'll be using lots of critical approaches on the exam, like narrative and ideology. Auteur theory is just one way that you can look at films.

It's just one of the many critical approaches. So where does it begin? Auteur theory is widely credited as originating from a French writer and eventually film director, a guy called Francois Truffaut.

So he was at the time. I'm writing for a magazine. called Cahiers du Cinéma, along with other famous film academics, critics, writers, André Bazin, and also another fellow film director, Jean-Luc Godard.

And he wrote an essay called A Certain Tendency of French Cinema. He spends quite a lot of this essay just ripping into directors that he doesn't like. And the directors that he doesn't like, he refers to these directors as metas en scène.

And a meta en scène is basically a director who's tech- Technically fine, you know, make okay films, nothing to kind of criticize them for in terms of the way they've been put together. But they're just a bit bland, a bit voiceless. There's no individual personality that stands out to the viewer as he watches them. And he said this belongs to a tradition of quality. these types of films he said they're all part of this tradition of quality that is common in French films and he was not a big fan of tradition in fact he would later go on to become a director as part of the French New Wave so you can see you know New Wave obviously doesn't sound very traditional does it and his biggest sort of bugbear was when these directors these metas on scene were taking novels or taking scripts that were written by another script writer and just doing a very faithful adaptation of that source from page to screen and he was saying what's the point in that really if you want to just see a novel turn into the film why don't you just read the novel?

The novel's there already. The whole point of cinema is that we're bringing something new to it and it's the director's job to do that. So if he didn't like those types of directors, these metas on the scene, what did he like?

And the answer is auteurs. He refers to them as auteurs. And auteur is the French word for author. And we obviously, when we think about that in English-speaking countries, we think about someone who writes novels.

Generally speaking, writing a novel is a solitary practice. It's something that you do on your own. And if you look at a novel by... say um feodor dostoevsky or something like that it's very clear that they're the author of that novel and there might be other people who might help them out along the way but it's their novel okay and that is what um truffaut felt the director should do they should have the same amount of creative control and the same amount of influence over a film as an author a novelist does over a book so along with having that sort of full creative control over the film what an author needed to do according to truffaut was they needed to show themselves up on the screen they need to expose themselves their vulnerabilities so not literally being on the screen but in terms of their soul if you like so all of their fears their anxieties their hopes their dreams all of this should be laid bare on the screen for the audience to see and in showing that to the audience it would enable the audience to better understand their own fears and dreams and hopes and anxieties okay and that for Truffaut was the um ultimate mark of quality for a piece of art and we'll get onto criticisms of auteur theory in a moment but just to kind of say a couple of nice kind words about Truffaut and Cahiers de Cinéma and the writers of that really for them they were amongst the first to really make the case that film could be or was an art form and should be held in the same regard as great works of literature or amazing you know works of art paintings and stuff like that you know If film is an art form, then filmmakers were therefore artists and they should be respected and treated as such, hence the auteur theory.

And if it weren't for magazines like Cahiers du Cinéma and it wasn't for people like Truffaut, etc., championing cinema as an art form, we probably wouldn't be studying it now in schools and sixth forms in universities. So Truffaut wrote... A Certain Tendency of French Cinema, I think in 1953, it was published in 1954, something like that. Cut to just, you know, about eight years later and you've got Andrew Sarris, an American film critic, and he wrote an essay article called notes on the auteur theory in 1962 and saris sort of said the auteur theory is great but it's a little bit woolly we need to firm it up we need to give a bit more of a shape so what saris did and this was his development of the auteur theory was he said that directors had to do three things in order to be considered an auteur okay and he sets it up as like circles so you've got the outer circle um which is technical competence that's the first thing they have to do and then the second circle which is a distinguishable personality or recurring characteristics and then the final one uh to get to the bullseye in the center of it to be considered an auteur is interior meaning so let's talk about those three so technical competence uh what sarah said by that is that in order to be considered a great director you had to be at least a good director so you need to know how to work all the you know camera equipment you need to have to structure a film's narrative tell stories that kind of stuff okay so that's the first thing if you can do that then you can get considered eligible for the second one and this is the one that a lot of people kind of think about and think about auteur theory and he said they had to have a distinguishable personality and basically that means that there needs to be recurring motifs or characteristics things that the director keeps doing over a body of work okay and this is what you know lots and lots of directors do then um and really since you know saris has said this i think a lot of directors have purposely kind of gone for that in order to be considered auteurs um and you can see it in the 70s with that kind of you know american um new hollywood thing with like scorsese and francis ford coppola and stuff also in the 90s um and up to you know today so films that are very easily recognizable as being made by that director is a really good um example of this second characteristic so if we look at you know one of the most obvious ones people point to would be something like Wes Anderson so you know Wes Anderson he always has that sort of central shot composition he uses that kind of pastel color palette I guess you would say you know very deliberately constructed you know almost a flat look to his films in terms of the aesthetic but it's not just to do with the aesthetic that you know the look of the film or the feel of the film it's also to do with things like directors might have particular themes they keep revisiting or particular narrative structures or particular character types. So, you know, obvious ones for that would be something like Hitchcock, you know, loves voyeurism, puts out in a lot of his films.

In terms of his narratives, they quite often start in disequilibrium or have a very short equilibrium in terms of characters. You know, the cool blonde for one. Also, you know, the wrong man character, that kind of stuff.

So these are all things that would be part of Hitchcock's distinguishable personality and make him eligible for that second circle. And the final and third circle in order to become an auteur, that last criteria, is what Saris refers to as interior meaning. It's a little bit vague, I think, a little bit woolly what he means by this. But the phrase he uses is where the meaning of the film is created from the tension between the director's personality and the source material.

So I think this is kind of a run on from what Truffaut was saying in the... The director's personality should trump the source material, it should transcend that, and the film should be about the director as personality, as opposed to, you know, doing a faithful adaptation of a script or a book. Okay, right, so the next addition to the auteur theory was a British film writer, critic, academic, called Peter Wallen. He wrote a book in, I think it was 1969, called Signs and Meaning. or maybe meaning and signs.

And in it, he sets out a league table of directors, okay? So you've got the lower rungs, and they're like, okay, and then you've got the good ones, and you've got the really good ones. And then at the very, very top of this league table of directors, you've got what he refers to as the pantheon, okay? And the pantheon are, for him, the ultimate auteurs. And in that, you've got lots of familiar names.

So you've got Orson Welles. who I believe is one of the component one section a lady Shanghai's in there you've got Alfred Hitchcock you've also got Charlie Chaplin you've got John Ford you've got Ernst Lubitsch loads of directors well not loads probably about 12 or 13 and something like that okay and what's interesting about Wallen's pantheon is in it he really kind of sets out who the the canon of the great directors and the great works are for film studies and lots of kind of people from that point on would look at those and would say, like, you know, these are the great films, if you like, in the same way that, like, in English lit, you know, the canon would be full of people like Shakespeare, for example. Let's move on to criticisms of the auteur theory.

And for that, we're really going to be focusing on one film critic, and that is the legend. Pauline Kael okay so Pauline Kael also an American film critic she read Saris's notes on auteur theory and she did not like it one bit so what Pauline Kael did was she wrote a rebuttal article called circles and squares in which she basically just like tears strips of Andrew Saris and it's a bit like sort of the film critic equivalent of a rap battle and she just says like everything he says is idiotic the first one technical competence she says that one is done because She says that technical competence, and this I think she's a bit in agreement with Truffaut, and she said technical competence doesn't necessarily make for good films. In fact, it can make for quite bland films.

So, you know, a filmmaker might make technically competent films, but there's no innovation there. And because there's no innovation, there's no uniqueness, there's no artistry. Hence, you cannot be considered an auteur, all right, or a great director or a maker of great films, at least.

So she said in order for film to kind of be considered an art form, you need to get people who are going to break the rules. And they're not going to do that if... if they're kind of following the technical competence thing of what directors should do. Second one, the distinguishable personality, the repeated characteristics across films. So this is a really good one.

She says, you know, when did repetition become a good thing? Okay, so one of her quotes in it is something along the lines of, repetition without development is decline. The idea that if you keep doing the same thing and not developing or not moving forward, you're basically going downhill as a...

filmmaker um and she said you know it's the equivalent of praising um a garment um or uh you know a technical product like a phone for whatever because of the the label that made it okay so like you know if you've got a calvin klein suit you know saying this is a great suit because it's calvin klein or because you've got the latest apple iphone you're saying it's a great phone because it's apple okay you're paying for the label in those instances and she's saying doesn't know necessarily make it great she said when the film is good we focus on the film when the film is bad we because of the auteur theory we focus on the person who makes it and we say well it must be great because alfred hitchcock made it okay and this is quite interesting because you know and to be fair um this is one of the things about the auteur theory which i think is a little bit but true foe um in an interview said something along the lines of a paraphrasing here an unsuccessful film by an auteur is always more interesting more worth considering over a film by someone who's not an auteur, even great films maybe. So that's kind of interesting. And I do wonder if that's the case.

So something like Vertigo, for example, when Vertigo came out, it didn't get very good reviews. There's a famous one in Variety. And I think the writer of this Variety review said something like, you know, Alfred Hitchcock here is repeating himself again, but this time in slow motion. The idea that he's doing something that he's done before, but just not as well, not as successfully.

But because of... I think the auteur theory, because of books like that Hitchcock Truffaut one and stuff like that, lots of people kind of kept going back to Vertigo and give it a second and a third and a fourth watch because, you know, it's Alfred Hitchcock, so it must be good, right? And now, you know, Vertigo is considered the greatest film of all time, according to, you know, the Science Sound Poll, and it is considered one of his masterpieces. Were it not for the auteur theory, I don't think people would be saying that about it.

It probably would have been forgotten. You could make the case. I don't know. Maybe that's controversial, but there we go.

And the third one, the interior meaning one, she says, you know, this again is ridiculous. Why would it be a good thing for a director to be in conflict or for there to be tension between the director and the source material? Surely the best film is going to be one where the director and the source material are working in harmony together to bring out the best of both.

So that's her criticisms of Andrew Sarris. It's pretty savage. It's definitely worth a read.

Circles and squares. And then a couple of years later, I'm not quite sure when, she wrote an essay. about Citizen Kane called Raising Kane okay and Citizen Kane is directed by Orson Welles and lots of people say again before Vertigo toppled it off the sight and sound poll Citizen Kane was considered the greatest film ever made and people were saying the reason why it's so great is because Orson Welles had loads and loads of creative control okay the studio just said you go make the film do what you want to do and he made this this film and you know Orson Welles co-wrote it stars in it and directed it but she's saying a lot of the things that people praise Citizen Kane for you know the the writing, the narrative structure of it, and the cinematography, the fact that Orson Welles does stuff where he shoots to the ceiling, and there's all these great bits of deep focus and stuff in there. So a lot of that stuff that people are praising for and accrediting to Welles and saying this is why he's such a great filmmaker is actually due to other people who worked on the film. Joseph Mankiewicz co-wrote the script of Citizen Kane.

So he's got to get credited for it. And Greg Tolland, all that amazing deep focus photography that people are loving in Citizen Kane, that's because of the... the cinematographer Greg Todland. So this is a big problem with the Oter theory is that, you know, it doesn't acknowledge...

the significant contributions that all of the other people who worked on that film we can look at things like Hitchcock you know you've got Bernard Herrmann you've got Edith Head um you know with uh Blade Run you've got Vangelis you've got Sid Mead you know not to mention the actors in these films you know James Stewart and you know Harrison Ford all these other people working on these films do they not have an influence on how the film turns out and then the last one and I unfortunately I don't have sort of a person to to credit with this one although I'm sure lots of people have said it but the problem with the OTA theory and you can see this in wallen's pantheon and also you can see it in the essays written by trufo and saris because they refer to the director as he throughout and if you look at wallen's pantheon they're all men and also they're all white as well when we look at things like the oscars we're still seeing you know this massive massive imbalance towards white men if you google the list of non-white directors to win best director at the oscars it is you pitifully small so I think there have been 455 nominations for Best Director of that only 5 of them were women, only 13 of them were people of colour And from the 92 winners that we've had of the Best Director, this is in 2020, making this video, one woman has won the Best Director Oscar, Catherine Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. Only two of the winners have been people of colour. And one of those was this year, Bong Joon-ho for Parasite. So, you know, the Ota theory and that canon, that pantheon that Wallen has set up might be one of the problems with, you know, the institutional sexism and racism of Hollywood, perhaps. so to summarize then the auteur theory uh francois truffaut said the best directors the ones who put their soul up on screen um and show their vulnerability and their fears and their anxiety according to andrew saris in order to be an auteur you had to be technically competent have a distinguishable personality and your films had to have interior meaning in terms of criticisms uh pauline cow in particular she's the one who takes against andrew saris and she said that technical competence isn't always great because it makes for boring bland filmmaking uh distinguishable person personality isn't good either because it's just repeating yourself and repeating yourself is not a good thing you should develop and lastly interior meaning that's stupid too because why would it be a good thing for a director to be in conflict to have tension between them and the source of material it should be working together her other big thing obviously as well is that film is a collaborative process so to you know the whole idea of you know one person having the greatest influence over a film is stupid because you've got so many people who work on a film to kind of just pinpoint it on one director it's to disregard the collaborative nature of filmmaking that's what makes it so unique and so great compared to other types of creative endeavors okay and final criticism is obviously that um the whole otter theory is just a bit of a white men's club so that's this video for otter theory at some point in the future i'm going to do another couple of videos where we apply otter theory to blade runner and to vertigo thanks very much bye

Transcript for:Exploring the Auteur Theory in Film

Transcript for:
Exploring the Auteur Theory in Film