"Auteur Theory"

Recently, my group presented on the history of the film industry. I’ve decided to use this blog as a means of investigating the relationship between the film world and the reality. One of the aspects of film that we really didn’t have a lot of time to discuss was the notion of the “auteur theory”. One of my group members hinted on this idea and noted it as the shift between the director being merely a project manager to the director being the given creative and social credit for the success of a film. This notion has French origins and began in the 1940s. The theory “asks us to take the cinema seriously, to put it on the same footing with literature and painting, to stop thinking of it as a circus, a burlesque show, or a way to keep children off the streets at night. The clearest contribution of the auteur critics has been to improve the pedigree of motion-picture art.” (Scott, p. 4)1
In other words, this notion gives directors the power to include personal, regional, and national biases in “their” work. Through the people that are cast, the way the setting is depicted, the amount of time that is given to particular scenes, denoting their relative importance, the director offers his individual perspective of the world as the dominant perspective. Imagine what happens when the directors share similar backgrounds, beliefs, and schemas (mental frameworks or patterns). When this occurs, the individual portrayals of these directors and their individual perspectives merge together to create a synchronized biased reality wherein these collective views are taken as truth.