- Executive producer: primarily responsible for financial control but may have creative input (particularly in editing / post production stages)
- Producer: primarily supervises production logistics and budget in tandem with director. May originate project and usually hires writers and director to be involved in casting.
- Director: primarily responsible for creative vision and creative decisions in collaboration with creative team.
- Writer: responsible for authoring original script or adapting existing library material.
Changing face of creative control
Cinema:
Silent era (1900 - 1927) - the director
Studio era (1930 - 60) - the producer
New wave (1960-80) - directors and writer-directors
Television:
Golden age (1950 - 60) - producers and writers
New wave (1960-70) - producers and directors
Writers (1980s - present) - producer-writers and showrunners
Origins of the auteur theory
- Cahiers Du Cinema (radical french film journal) - in 1954, critic Francois Truffaut writer a polemic in which he coins the phrase 'la politique des auteurs'
- Reaction against bland commercial cinema where the director largely regarded as chief technician who just shot the script (metteur-en-scene)
- Truffaut and fellow critics wanted instead a cinema d'auteurs: directors and director-writers who expressed and individualistic world view and use of mise en scene.
- This auteur cinema expressed in ground breaking French New Wave films of late 50s early 60s.
Definition of auteur
The auteur theory was championed in the US by film critic Andrew Sarris in his essay 'Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962'
- technical competence of the director - ability to organise a film with clarity and coherence.
- distinguishable personality of the director - recurring signature style
- interior meaning - the cinematic art created from tension between a director's personality and his material
- there are no bad films, only bad directors
- even the worst film of an auteur director can be rescued from anonymity
Issues with the auteur theory
- doesn't recognise collaborative nature of film and television, and in contribution of writers and technicians
- what directors were attempting to portray was secondary to the actual visualisation on screen
- only a few rare directors have 'final cut'
- genre theory as alternative to auteur theory
Genre theory focuses on:
- generic similarities
- how texts are determined by historical / social / political contexts
- how texts emerge as commercial products from an industry
Auteur theory focuses on:
- individual stylistic features
- how tests are determined by the director's creativity
- how texts emerge as part of director's body of work
TV auteurs:
- Stephen Poliakoff: began writing career in theatre; award winning playwright. Commissioned by BBC and others to write several TV films, working with established producers and directors. Made directing debut with Hidden City (1988, Film4). Since 1988 has written and directed over a dozen features, TV movies and mini series mostly for BBC. Allowed to exercise control over casting and final cut.
- technical competence (framing and mise-en-scene, camera movement, editing).
- recurring visual motifs (long tracking shots, deep focus, clash between modernity and traditional, slow pace.
- interior meaning (history, memory, ghosts of past, secrets, social class, themes of control and power).
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