Authorship
- Eliana Kouzom
- October 11, 2024
- 11:14 am
Authorship: Film is A Collaborative Medium
In the text ” A Certain Tendency of French Cinema,” Truffaut claims that the director, whose creative vision and personal style are noticeable in film, is the true auteur of a film. The auteur theory was officially formalised within the 1950s amongst French movie critics. The theory says the director is seen as the main author in the film due to he/ she having control over the creative vision of the entire film, and his/ her personal touch is recognizable in their movies. Truffaut means that the director’s contribution to the film’s creation is considered decisive and the origin of the whole work. However, this director’s tribute to this extent can lead us to forget/underestimate the significance of the rest of the filmmaking crew. Gerstner and Staiger argue that the film is a primarily collaborative medium, so it would seem odd that theorists are constantly searching for the singular artist responsible for authorship (Tregde, 2013). A movie is made through interwoven knowledge and skills provided by a group of people, not only one person. The film is a collaborative production that includes many individual artistic works, as a consequence, it is not logical to elevate the director’s status in film production.
Truffaut claims that the director is often regarded as the central figure in a project due to the vision they have that he/ she envisions as the filmmaking is going on. According to Gerstner and Staiger such a view fails to be considered because the film’s nature is not a unilateral medium; rather, it is collaborative. Gerstner and Staiger explain that the concept of collective authorship refers to the collaborative effort toward a common goal. They mean that the contributions of the various individuals who make up the creative process can also be considered as part of the collective effort (Gerstner & Staiger, 2003). It is not ideal for one person to be the sole author of the film, owing this concept overlooks the various creative fields that are also important in film production. Without the collective effort of the various individuals involved in a film, it would not be possible to release a movie. The director is the leader in the film’s production who remains and supervises his/her team but the rest of the film crew is working to achieve the director’s vision. Direction’s creative vision means the way the director sees the film in his mind and explains it to the film team, e.g. costume and sound effects (Hedin, 2017). Truffuat has a point of thinking here but, without a professional cinematographer or a lighting team, a great film would not be possible to be produced.
Films have many elements that come together in “some degree of coherency (Tregde, 2013). The “mutual interaction” between the world created and the makers is what gives rise to authorship, where each participant enriches the film by his/her particular skill. The cinematographers, editors, and animators construct the world we see as the work, while the writers, directors, and producers make the work (Tregde, 2013). Through this interaction, we view a whole, and it is this whole that is authored by various talents and the crew. Multiple artists and craftsmen have authored the perceived world of a film with some degree of coherency (Sellors, 2007).
Paul Sellors, in his book ” Film Authorship Authors and other myths” refers to a director who is at the center of the film’s creation, but he also draws attention to the fact that screenwriters, actors, or even producers can be at the center too. The central vision of the director is what guides everyone who works on a film, but more often than not, it is not the director’s creative vision whose only creative vision or voice that comes through a film (Sellors, 2007)(Tregde, 2013). For example, One of the most noted people in cinema history is Ray Harryhausen, the technical effects man who invented stop motion animation, making it
come alive and making an amazing-looking movie, the original King Kong. Up to the present time, the movies that Harryhausen worked on are marketed as Ray Harryhausen movies, even though he only did the stop-motion animation (Eldridge, 2022). One of those in recent years has been the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, he did the lighting and cinematography for the 2019 movie 1917 which is about a world war I (Despotakis, 2019). Such cases where you are elevating someone who worked on the movie, not the director, which is undermining what we call the auteur theory.
Another problem, mentioned earlier in this text, is that Truffaut also argues that the director is the artist of the film and that film reflects the director’s personal style, in which the spectator can spot their personal touch either through style stories or from his/her chosen subject. Just to clarify, personal touch does mean an element or feature contributed by a person to make something that refers to his/her identity, according to the Oxford dictionary, in film context it could be the particular way that directors express themselves in their work. He suggests that the director’s work is key to a movie’s artistic identity. Moreover, it does not necessarily tell if the director was the one who had significant influence on the film or the other people who were engaged in the film. In other words, it is not only the director who can put his personal touch into the film; it could be the influence of other artist(s) who participated in creating the movie. John Willaim is one of the very powerful voices and creative artists. He writes scores for movies. William, as a composer, creates feelings and gestures, and overtones in all the movies he has worked on, and no matter who the director is he is working with, we can tell it is a John William score by the musical choices he makes (Kettler, 2018). Another composer is Bernard Herrmann, who did a lot with Alfred Hitchock (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2021). These examples show that Truffaut’s claim about the director’s films reflects the director’s personal touch can not hold up.
It is worth mentioning that if we want to apply the auteur theory to a single movie and look at it for the influence that the director might have on it, it will be hard to determine it (Sellors, 2007). Inasmuch as it requires watching and analyzing enormous films by the same director to identify the director’s personal style. With a purpose to find out what type of story choice, tropes, and editing scheme might be some of the shots they choose for the setting. Only in this case could the auteur theory work well, whereas it might tip us off to particular choices that the director makes over the course of the body of his/her work. Thus, the auteur theory will not work if we want to identify the director’s personal style if the director has a couple of movies. And besides this, it is a matter of intent. The Intent of artistic work in film is a tricky thing to suppose or judge (Sellors, 2007).
Some may argue that directors are the ones who lead us to see their movies. In fact what springs to mind is that a few directors whose names alone can draw more audiences to see their works, who are well known to the wide world and the mass movie-going public, and though they can use their names to promote a movie; such as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, and Christopher Nolan. A director becoming a star does not happen very often in today’s world. It is important to mention, that even the actors and actresses can draw a huge amount of audience to the movie, they tend to be glamorised, they tend to get a lot of credit and they tend to be the ones whom we go to see movies for. To a certain extent this argument could be right, if someone liked a movie from a certain director a lot, it will increase the opportunity to watch more movies from the same director. On the one hand, if someone likes an actor’s performance they will be eager to watch movies where this actor participated. To mention a few actors and actresses, Al Pacino, Dwayne Johnson, Jackie Chan, Robin Williams, Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock, Angilina Juli, Jennifer Aniston, and the list goes on,
these names draw an army of audience. They were an artistic addition and a milestone in the films they participated in.
Truffaut gives importance to the director exaggeratedly by seeing the film as primarily the creative vision of its director. There are two things to argue, everything on the soundtrack and on the screen is because the director wanted it there. Moreover, all those elements have the outcome in the movie that the director intended to have. It has to be mentioned that the varying and disparate inputs in film can make assigning authorship more difficult to identify (Gerstner & Staiger, 2003). To clarify, a single movie comprises a roster of hundreds of people that could convey messages or ideas with or without intendancy. Nevertheless, without a good team, nothing can be done. Having a creative vision that could be a brilliant idea or message behind the motion screen is countable, but what is the value of an idea without execution? It takes a team to make a movie. Movies as an art form are collaborative efforts, therefore the concept of a single visionary author whose work is seen as the film is a reflection of themselves, in fact, it is a collaborative effort where the production team members work and engage together to produce a movie. We can not give the credit of a movie to only its director, there is a whole team behind it, and it requires many people to do lots of different tasks all along the production process. Applying a single authorship concept to novels is more reasonable because they usually do it by themselves by using limited tools.
Auteur theory’s concept is that the primary author does not recognize the rest of the cast and the crew, i.e., cinematographers, editors, special effects people, costume designers, composers, makeup artists, Etc. Film production is a collaborative and liberal medium, where the director is not the only person whose creative voice comes through a movie and could be considered an auteur. When we watch any single individual movie, we might say it is a director who has reasonable control over film production to maintain the dynamic relationship between all production parts. However, a group of people are entirely involved in shaping a movie’s creative influence. As mentioned in this text earlier, many people in movie history have not been directors who have been seen as having an immense influence on the movies they have worked on. To put it another way, It is not always the director’s personal touch that is noticeable in a film; it could be someone else’s personal touch. The notion of the auteur is over-calculatedIn, especially in a field where many artists, from actors and writers to editors and designers collaborate together. Once we see the credits at the tip of the movie, thousands of individuals have a point of creative influence on a film; with many folks working diligently on a film, how can one person be the reason for such an immense collaborative production. Due to the nature of film as a joint effort, it is inherently problematic to assign film authorship to one person. Without the whole team, a movie could not see the light.
Sources:
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Eldridge, Alison. (May 3, 2022). “Ray Harryhausen.” Retrieved May 09, 2022, from [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ray-Harryhausen).
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Kettler, Sara. (Jan 23, 2018). “John Williams Biography.” Retrieved May 08, 2022, from [Biography](https://www.biography.com/musician/john-williams).
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Dec 20, 2021). “Bernard Herrmann American composer and conductor.” Retrieved May 08, 2022, from [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bernard-Herrmann).
Tregde, David. (2013). “A Case Study on Film Authorship: Exploring the Theoretical and Practical Sides in Film Production.” Retrieved May 07, 2022, from [Elon University](https://eloncdn.blob.core.windows.net/eu3/sites/153/2017/06/01DavidTregdeEJFall13.pdf).
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