Auteur Theory

Not a bad theroy.....

__________________
Death to Smoochy is my most anticipated movie of 2002.

Here's one i noticed for john travolta.

I saw "michael" for the first time the other day and i noticed that travolta is always dancing. There is always some scene in his movies where he works out a dance. Grease and saturday night fever are obvious, but in all his other movies there have been some little dance scenes. If you can think of any that dont have a dance scene in it, post it. Except for his recent movies. i dont remember any dancing in battlefield earth or swordfish. lately his signature has just been bad film making.

It is but one page, but this thread remains one of the better in MoFo's storied history, in my opinion.

I realise now, looking back on it, how without a clue we guys were though. The auteur theory has nothing no do with trademarks and signatures and reoccuring themes. It's about authorship. More than anyone else, Miriam was right:

Anyway, the more I've learnt about it over the years, the more into it I become, especially in terms of my own films. I like to have my hands dipped in everything, "mixing it up" [to quote Royal Tenenbaum]. I shoot and edit my own stuff, as well as writing and directing it. There aren't that many directors still doing that either. Robert Rodriguez does it all, but it's slowly getting to be that an "auteur" is a director who writes his own stuff.

That's all good and well ['cause I love people like Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino], but I'd like to think that I will be able to continue on my try-a-bit-of-everything way in the future. I like to shoot and edit.

__________________
www.esotericrabbit.com

Oooh, why haven't I seen this one before... !!!!



The auteur teory started in France in the late 50's and it is really about uplifting the director to the same artistic status as painters and writers. They worshipped the obvious art filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman but they also adored the Hollywood studio system directors like Hitchcock and Ford.

An auteur has a vision, and has the power and the artistic power to realize that vision in his/her film. The auteur theorists were of the opinion that true auteurs really only make one film and then they make the same film over and over again, realizing the inner vision and moving towards perfection. An auteur has an original and unique style as well as complete artistic freedom.

The cool thing with the founders of the auteur theory was that they hailed the Hollywood studio system directors as heroes during a time when most critics, not unlike nowadays, thought that everything coming out of Hollywood was garbage (Look at the french critic turned director Goddard's Breathless) .At the same time, directors like Hitchcock and Ford didn't consider themselves being artists or their work being art. They though about it as a way to make a living. During the shooting of a scene in a Hitchcock movie Ingrid Bergman was having trouble with the scene and when asking the master what her motivation was in this scene, he simply replied: "Ingrid, for god's sake! It's just a movie!".

So who are the american auteurs of today? I think there are a couple besides the really obvious ones like Scorsese, Allen, Lee, Altman, Jarmusch, Lynch and so on.

Firstly, I think there are a few that are auteurs of the "old school". I mean, like with an own style and similar themes in all of their films. Filmmakers that you can recognize after five minutes.

For example there is Michael Mann who seems to be making films about men put in emotional conflicts. The men in Mann's film are almost always being torn between a dedication or a obsession for a job or a career or something like that and the lovelife and the family life. (Both the De Niro and the Pacino characters in Heat, Crowe and Pacino in Insider, the main characters in his earlier films Manhunter and Thief). And ever since his Miami Vice days you can spot a dualism between a glossy glamourous look and a gloomy feeling. The story is often set at night in Mann films and if it isn't, he uses tools to remind you of the darkness (use of blue filter in sunny scenes, etc.).

Paul Thomas Anderson is probably the brightest shining star on the american auteur heaven. His films are always about loneliness and being misunderstood or not seen at all and how lonesome people someway find their way to love of friendship or feeling of belonging, and how they do this in remarkable ways. His films also deal with the idea of things that never would happen in a million years that sometimes happen anyway. His characters are often ordinary people that for some reason are viewed as weird and that are emotionally trapped. Technically speaking, Anderson is a true master using source light skillfully and with weightless camera movements. I am sure he will be regarded as one of the best directors that ever lived if he keeps making films like the ones he's made so far.

Steven Soderbergh is a little different than Mann and Anderson. He makes films that sometimes are artistically adventurous and sometimes plain and consciously commercial. But somewhere I sense a typical Soderbergh feel. I saw Erin Brockovich the other day, which is one of his on many levels more successfull commercial films, and for some reason it reminded me of The Limey - a critically acclaimed film but definately a small indie. I think there is something in the lighting. It's also the same feel in Traffic. I can't find a theme that comes back again and again in his films so in terms of Soderbergh being an auteur or not, I guess I don't know. He doesn't really seem to have a vison on what his films must be about but certainly on how to make them.

When it comes to directors like Tarantino and the Coen brothers I think their trademark is that they can borrow stuff from old movies and put it together to something new.

Tim Burton is another director I would consider to call an auteur. Isn't his films always about outcasts? And they have a gothic feel over them too.

Finally, I would have to defend old Spielberg a little here. I have always had a kind of love-hate relationship to his films. I think they are drenched in a sentimentalism that threatens to sufficate me and he always work too hard to rub the audience the right way, but at the same time I believe his films are exactly like he wants them to be and that he has some kind of vision that he brings to reality over and over again. Technically, he is also flawless. There are a lot of things that are typically Spielberg too, but this post is getting long allready....

__________________
The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

--------

They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

To me an auteur is a director who when you see a movie by him/her you know it is done by them, I think Tarantino, Burton, and Gilliam are the 3 most noticeable aueteurs.

__________________

This is going to sound bizarre, but I'd like to add Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier [not so bizarre that second one] to the list of modern auteurs.

Van Sant, as of late, has really started to push the medium, to a point where a certain type of picture is beginning to feel like a "Gus Van Sant Film". See Gerry, see Elephant, think video games and the way we interpret imagery.

That is all.

What do you mean about interpreting imagery with Van Sant?

Just because Lars von Trier is an 'auteur', it doesn't mean I can't hate him and his depraved abuse of cinema.

__________________
**** the Lakers!

yeah definetly Lars Von Trier, he has his own unique style and he is a major European innovator in modern cinema today.
thinkin about that i dont really understand what you mean by:
"his depraved abuse of cinema."

And when it comes to Coen brothers and their signatures:

Dogs: There are dogs in Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, oh Brother where art thou, intoreable cruelty and so no...

Funny haircuts: Check out Turturros hair in barton Fink and Big lebowski, also Clooneys hair in oh brother...
Nick Gages and Tim Robbins hair are also great.

Fat men yelling: Barton Fink, Big Lebowski, Intoreable Cruelty.
but it all depents on what you consider fat.

Ignoring the topic of the "auteur theory", and following the directors trademarks/signatures.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: I have not seen all of the directors films, but from the hand full I have seen (and the writing on his work that I've read), It seems that he always has a really bizaar ending. eg; in "The American Soldier" a man literally rolls around on the ground, with his dead brothers body in his arms, for about a minute at around 68fps (slow motion).

Andrei Tarkovsky: Supposably, all of his films have hints on what his next film will be about. This is something I have yet to notice, but then again, I never saw all of his films yet.

Stanley Kubrick: Usually he deals with Carl Jung's Philosophy on the "duality of man". I believe that one of his characters (Joker from "Full Metal Jacket"), mentions Jung to his commanding officer, when he is asked why he has "born to kill" written on his helmet, and a peace button on his chest.

__________________
"I know a man who was born with his heart on the outside. Every man's worst fear, he also had heavy hands. he couldn't touch his lovers face, he couldn't hold a baby." - Buck 65

How about David Lynch?

__________________

The First Person Shooter [FPS] format of video games such as Tomb Raider, where the camera keeps the character in the center of the screen for what is ultimately a continuous, uncut "take", is apparent in both Gerry and [even more so] in Elephant. We automatically associate this sort of imagery with FPS games, in which, of course, we control the characters ourselves. Thus, the format ties the viewer to the character in the same intimate manner as when one plays a video game. The viewer and the character become one, so to speak. A number of people who watched Elephant have commented on feeling unusually close to the characters in the film. I put this down to the way they have interpreted Van Sant's FPS-inspired imagery.

Of course not.

A fine post, but I believe FPS refers to games such as Quake or Wolfenstein, wherein we see things from the character's point of view. Tomb Raider is, to my memory, in the third person.

Good point, Chris.
My VG lingo is a little rusty.

TPS, not FPS.

Ok, firstly let's add a coupla ickle things that can help define these two:

Tarantino: Has minor cameo roles, he also has recurring actors(Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Uma Thurman...etc)

Allen: His films are usually - if not always - set in New York, about working class New Yorkers. As always, there are exceptions. The camera also loves New York in his films, much like the French New Wavers loved Paris

Now Onto The Coens...

Heaven/Hell references - this was mentioned earlier, with the angels and devils

Crime - Fargo(Kidnapping), Big Lebowski(Kidnapping), Barton Fink(Murder), etc...

Repetition of lines - "Kinda Funny Lookin" in Fargo, there was another fargo one methinks but I can't remember it. Big Lebowski had "shut up donny" and at one point donny keeps saying "i am the walrus". In each of their films, there is repetition.

The dark humor i guess

Recurring Actors - Buscemi, Goodman, McDormand, etc

Their leading male characters don't usually do all that much, but are dragged into things.

I guess they use a lot of homage...or rip a lot of stuff off depending on perspective...blood simple(neo noir) and Hudsucker Proxy(Completely taken from Mr Deeds Goes To Town{Capra})

Ridley Scott seems to be hung up on his mother.

A couple of examples are:

The computer's name in Alien is Mother.

Leon shoots Holden right after Holden asks him what he remembers about his mother in BladeRunner.

He dedicates his awards to his Mom as well.....

Hmm, I don't see him as an Auteur though. Lynch and Gilliam are some Auteur guys I like.

For the last time already, people, reoccuring themes do not automatically denote that someone's an auteur!

Right, that is what I had thought, but I saw everyone posting themes and figured I actually didn't know what auteur meant after all, but it turns out I did and they didn't but I followed and ....meh...doesn't matter, I watched Casino last night.

Auteur, individual or group of individuals who leave their signature on a body of films.
Can i suggest Luc Besson, John Woo, Sam Raimi

George Lucas - Faith and religion

John McTiernan - The under dog.

__________________
Tremble and despair for I am power! - Milamber - Magician

Visit the best film forum on the web http://www.empireonline.co.uk/