page_title: Auteur
section_title: Origin
hierarchical_section_title: Auteur / Film / Origin
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: François Truffaut le 15 mars 1965 (lors d'un festival, ou une rétrospective consacrée à la Nouvelle Vague&#160;?), posant devant le cinéma CinéTol à Amsterdam, où est à l'affiche le film Le Beau Serge de Claude Chabrol, un autre cinéaste emblématique de ce mouvement.
context_page_description: An auteur is an artist, usually a film director, who applies a highly centralized and subjective control to many aspects of a collaborative creative work; in other words, a person equivalent to an author of a novel or a play. The term commonly refers to filmmakers or directors with a recognizable style or thematic preoccupation.
  Auteurism originated in the French film criticism of the late 1940s as a value system that derives from the film criticism approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc—dubbed auteur theory by the American critic Andrew Sarris. The theory found its official name in 1955 articles by François Truffaut. He defended directors Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, proposing to see their works as a whole, with recurring themes and obsessions.
  The concept has since been applied to producers of popular music as well as to video game creators.
context_section_description: Even before the auteur theory it was clearly defined, the director was considered to be the most important among the people working on a film. Early German film theorist Walter Julius Bloem credited this to film being an art for the masses, and the masses being accustomed to regard someone who gives the final product (in this case, the director) as an artist, and those who contribute before (i.e. screenwriters) as apprentices. Likewise, James Agee, one of the most famous film critics of the 1940s, said that "the best films are personal ones, made by forceful directors".
  Around the same time, the French film critics André Bazin and Roger Leenhardt became advocates for the theory that it is the directors who bring the film to life and use the film to express their thoughts and feelings about the subject matter as well as a worldview as an auteur. They emphasised that auteurs can use lighting, camerawork, staging and editing to add to their vision.
caption: Film director and critic François Truffaut in 1965
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