Auteur

An auteur (; French:, 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. One such well-known genre filmmaker is David Cronenberg, who has mainly worked in body horror subgenre.

In French cinema in the 1950s, when the New Wave began, few auteurs had emerged which was noted by Truffaut in his 1954 essay titled "A certain tendency in French cinema". Some of these film auteurs included Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, and Jacques Tati. The auteur concept has also been applied to non-film directors, such as popular music producers namely Phil Spector, considered the first music auteur and Brian Wilson, who was credited to be first pop musician to write, arrange, produce and perform his own material. Another media where auteur concept has been applied is video games, particularly video game designers and developers. Some of them are Hideo Kojima, Japan's pre-eminent auteur game designer, Hidetaka Miyazaki, who is known for having "total direction" and a defined style for his games such as Dark Souls, and Tim Schafer, whose work on Brütal Legend had shown distinct touches which are "snappy dialog, quirky characters and strange dreamlike environments".