“As the term suggests, an auteur is an author, someone whose aesthetic sensibilities and impact are most important in the creation of a text. With literary texts, discerning authorship is usually no problem. But with collaborative art forms, such as film, deciding on authorship is much more complicated. Generally speaking, film theorists have concluded that it is the director of a film who is the auteur, the most important creative figure.But auteur theory is concerned with more that one film; it is concerned with the work of a director – with his or her whole corpus of films, and with certain dominant themes and stylistic aspects of these films. The text in auteur criticism is not one film, but the body of work of the director.” Although both Akira Kurosawa and Robert Zemeckis have made many successful films there is a distinct difference in the filmmakers works. The authorship of the film is what creates the distinction between Kurosawa and Zemeckis films. Examining authorship is a challenge; critics and writers have been attempting to do it for years. The most comprehensive definition that I have found is the one quoted above from Berger’s Cultural Criticism. In non-technical language, authorship is looked upon as an unknown distinct element that one of the film’s cast or crew brings to it. Always changing, this unknown element may be derived from, an actor, director, editor or even a cinematographer. In the past there have been two distinctions made by critics regarding authorship. There is the claim that there is an elitist group of filmmakers who have a distinct definable quality to all of their films regardless of whether they are considered good or bad quality films. In essence, the caliber of the film itself seems to be irrelevant to the theory. This group is categorized under the much sought after term of auteur. This said, a bad film made by an auteur is alleged to better than the ...
