Is a film really made by its director? The fight over the auteur

When we say a film is "by" a director, we are using an idea with a date and an author. Before the formal development of auteur theory, the producer was considered a film's most important influence. Then French critics argued that a film's director is its true author: an auteur, an artist who can manifest a personal style, vision and thematic focus across a diverse body of work, like the author of a novel or a play.

The idea began in French criticism of the late 1940s and 1950s, from the writings of André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc and François Truffaut. In a 1954 essay Truffaut attacked the French cinema of the Tradition of Quality, in which screenwriters faithful to the script merely adapted a literary novel. In 1955 he coined the phrase la politique des auteurs, the policy of the authors: directors who put their personality into their work make better films. In 1962 the American critic Andrew Sarris popularized it in the United States, calling it the auteur theory. One effect: critical and public scrutiny of films shifted from their stars to the creators.

It was never accepted without a fight. Pauline Kael argued that Citizen Kane was not simply the handiwork of the auteur Orson Welles but a collaboration, with co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland instrumental. Film historian Aljean Harmetz used Casablanca, where the producer and the studio president gave key creative input, to argue that auteur theory collapses against the reality of the studio system.

The disagreement is more fruitful than it sounds. Sarris, on his feuds with Kael, said, "We made each other. We established a dialectic."