Question

When we defined the term “auteur” we said that these directors generally “have a distinctive style from film to film.” In the films that you saw how would you describe Spike Lee’s distinctive style? What do the films have in common? - Give a personal critic of the films you watched. Did you like them? Explain why you liked or disliked them

Answer 1

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 auter 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 French magazine Cahiers du cinéma was founded in 1951 and quickly became a focal point for discussion on the role of directors in cinema. François Truffaut criticized the prevailing "Cinema of Quality" trend in France in his 1954 essay Une certaine tendance du cinéma français  He characterised these films as being made by directors who were faithful to the script, which in turn was usually a faithful adaptation of a literary novel. The director was used only as a metteur en scene, a "stager" who simply adds the performers and pictures to an already completed script.Truffaut argued that the directors who had authority and flexibility over how to realise the script were the ones who made better films. He coined the phrase La politique des auteurs ("The policy of the authors") to describe his view. These discussions took place at the beginning of the French New Wave in cinema.

From 1960, with his first self-directed film The Bellboy, Jerry Lewis was one of the earliest Hollywood studio-system actor-turned-directors to be critiqued as an auteur. His attention to both the business and creative sides of production: writing, directing, lighting, editing and art direction coincided with the rise of the auteur theory. He earned consistent praise by French critics in both Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. His singular mis-en-scene, and skill behind the camera, was aligned with Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Satyajit Ray. Jean-Luc Godard said, "Jerry Lewis...is the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn't falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles. Lewis is the only one today who's making courageous films. He's been able to do it because his personal genius.