Any cinephile from stages of student to director will know and likely have used the term Auteur before. It has become one of those terms that gets thrown around so often the meaning develops and changes long past Andrew Sarris’s essays on film in the 60s, which was only the first time the term was used to appeal to english audiences (originally c.
For example, Hitchcocks Iconic dolly zoom (or vertigo effect) most commonly associated with Vertigo is to be mostly attributed to Cameraman Irmin roberts. The stunning use of colour in Vertigo was mostly down to cinematographer Robert Burks. The entirety of the narrative is down to two screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.
“Personal style” is a huge portion of what it means to be an auteur, yet, with teams of hundreds of visual experts, how is it just that all creative recognition is going to one person?
Achieving critically recognized Auteural status is obviously a huge honour, but once immensely powerful people (predominantly white and male people, according to the wikipedia list of film auteurs) have that status attached to them it can feed directly into their own god complexes and the pedestal they reside upon to those around them. And white men with god complexes are a dangerous thing. There is no need for me to go into the controversies surrounding Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino. Kubrick and Nolan are some of the names that have also been heavily criticized for treatment of their casts and crew (particularly women) along with many many more less acclaimed directors who have been recognized as auteurs according to one critic or another. Obviously this can’t be attributed just to the auteur theory, and mainly feeds into the can you separate art from the artist debate. But sitting in film class and listening to the same shrivelled up 60 year old spiel about Hitchcock the auteur without hearing a word about his cinematographers, editors, producers or the women he raped and abused on set of his films doesn’t sit well with me at all.