Auteurism refers to identifying the author or director of a film who imprints their unique vision and style. It was first proposed by French film critic Andre Bazin to elevate the status of film directors, similar to novelists and playwrights. Bazin argued one can identify an auteur through their consistent stylistic choices and examination of themes across multiple films. Later critics like John Caughie asserted the auteur is the director who transforms the material through their submerged personality. For a director to be considered the auteur, their films must demonstrate technical competence, recurring characteristics of style as their signature, and reveal aspects of their interior vision of the world.

1. AUTEURISM

2. WHAT IS AUTEURISM?
Auteurism simply means author in English. The idea of
authorship in films was first raised by the essay La
Politique des Auteurs (Published in 1957) by Andre Bazin in
the journal Cashiers du Cinema, a renowned French journal
on cinema. During this essay Bazin aimed to identify who
the author of a given film is. This is harder than it may
seem however as, unlike a theatre or a novel, a film is a
joint process, created by numerous people. This lead to
the question ‘how can just one person be the author of a
film?’.

3. BAZIN’S AIMS
Bazin, together with other auteur critics, wished to
raise the status of cinema and the position of
authors of films to be on level with that of
novelists and playwrights. However, to raise their
status the author of the film still needed to be
identified.

4. OTHER ARGUMENTS
John Caughie in the Theories of Authorship (1981)
argued that ‘the business of the critic was to
discover the director within the given framework,
to find the traces of the submerged personality, to
find ways in which the auteur had transformed the
material so that the explicit subject matter was not
what the film was about’

5. THE DIRECTOR
Usually the director would be chosen as the auteur
of a film. However, it could also be the producer,
the writer, the cinematographer and pretty much
anyone else who works on the film to bring it to
the final product. For a director to be considered
as the auteur, the following premise’s must be
followed/met.

6. PREMISE 1
• A badly directed film has no importance in a
critical evaluation
• The director MUST have a certain degree of
technical competence

7. PREMISE 2
• Over a group of films a director must exhibit
certain recurring characteristics of style, which
serve as his signature.
• The way a film looks and moves should have some
relationship to the way a director thinks and feels
• Examples of this could include Alfred Hitchcock
or Quentin Taratino.

8. PREMISE 3
• Aspects of the interior life are evident in the
director’s work
• It is the vision of the world a director projects
• An example of this could be Jane Campion and
her films which examine female sexuality from
a female perspective