Auteur

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An auteur (; French: [otœʁ], lit. 'author') is an artist with a distinctive approach, usually a film director who is considered the most important figure in filmmaking, equivalent to the "author" of a novel or a play, such that they can manifest a personal style, vision, and thematic focus across a diverse body of work. The concept distinguishes metteurs en scène—competent directors who make well-crafted films—from true auteurs. The concept of auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s and '50s, deriving from the writings of André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc and François Truffaut. In French cinema in the 1950s, when the New Wave began, few auteurs had emerged, a fact noted by Truffaut in his 1954 essay "A certain tendency in French cinema". Some of these film auteurs included Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, and Jacques Tati. In 1962, the American film critic Andrew Sarris popularized the concept in the United States, calling it the auteur theory. In the 1970s...

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