The Auteur Theory

The auteur theory offers a distinct view on films, stating that the movies portray a part of the director and is signed with the spesific qualities of the director. In his essay, “Towards Theory of Film History”, Sarris defends that the auteur theory changed the way film critics valued films. This theory was revolutionary since it brought a whole new set of values against Hollywood filmmaking. In Hollywood, the director is only good as his/her last movie. No movie industry executive will care about the previous accomplishments of a director, if his last movie did not make the revenue the producers were expecting. With the auteur theory, the ranking of the directors is based on the thorough investagation of the director’s career, rather than …show more content…
Art-cinema directors did not have the obligation to follow the formulaic rules of the Hollywood storytelling; most of the times they had to break them. Their movies were as successful as they were revolutionary. Art-cinema directors embraced life’s ambiguity. Most of the conflicts in their films arose from the psychological reasons rather than tangible reasons. Since they don’t need to have goal-oriented characters or follow a structured story to entertain an audience, art-cinema directors have much more freedom to be the fundamental storyteller of the film, rather than the technician of the process. The directors have “authorial expressivity”, which means they are able to decide what the story is saying and how it is expressed. They can put their signatures in the movie with their autobiographical stories as in the case of Fellini and Truffaut or they can put their stylistic authorial marks. Bordwell goes on to say, the director establishes himself as an auteur with breaking the norms of classic filmmaking. These can be, but not limited to an unusual angle, a jump cut, a “magical” change in the setting or an unreliable …show more content…
Although he hired a professional cinematographer to convey his story in the most effective way to be heard and be taken seriously, he added stylistic touches to it. In this film, the freeze frame was his visual signature, which can be seen in the concluding scene where the camera optically zooms in on his face as the frame stays still. His main creative contribuiton, however, is the story itself. The story is, in many ways, a confessional piece about his own childhood. He shared many similarities with Antoine, the protagonist of the film. Both of them were born to an unwed mother, had a stepfather that did not like him and were unsuccesfful in school but passionate in films. Truffaut was one of the first filmmakers to use film as a medium to confess his life story. He paved the way for future filmmakers to tell their personal