Auteur

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, and 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 of auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s and '50s, and derived from the writings of André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc and François Truffaut. In 1962, American film critic Andrew Sarris popularized the concept in the United States, calling it the auteur theory. In the 1970s, partly due to the wide acceptance of the auteur theory, the New Hollywood era emerged with studios granting directors greater leeway. By the 1980s, however, several costly box-office failures prompted studios to take back a degree of control from directors.

Pauline Kael argued against auteur theory, saying that "auteur" directors depend heavily on the contributions of others, like cinematographers. David Kipen stated that the screenwriter is a film's main author, a viewpoint termed "Schreiber theory". Aljean Harmetz listed Casablanca (1942) as an instance where the producer and studio head exerted major creative control. Georges Sadoul deemed a film's putative "author" could even be an actor, but that cinema is at its core a collaborative art. Genre theory counters the concept of auteur theory by showing that directors can work in genres that do not require an auteur style to film them.