Auteur Theory Research Articles

Autor telewizyjny? Przypadek Matthew Weinera

American critics often refer to showrunners as television auteurs. Do showrunners deserve this title? Applying the assumptions of François Truffaut’s la politique des auteurs, as well as Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory, this article discusses the case of Matthew Weiner, the showrunner of Mad Men, a television series set in the 1960s America. Examining each stage of the show’s production process allows to prove that Weiner had decisive influence on scripts, direction, casting, cinematography, costume and production design, music and the editing of his project. Perhaps it is time to stop considering series as a collective work – due to the differences between director’s role in film and in television – and instead focus on its auteur features, since it can be argued that we owe the latest golden age of television to the increase in the showrunners’ creative autonomy.

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Transmedia Serial Narration: Crossroads of Media, Story, and Time

Transmedia Serial Narration: Crossroads of Media, Story, and Time

Ambiguous Authorities: Vertigo and the Auteur Figure

This article examines authorial performance in the context of DC’s Vertigo line. In the 1990s, Vertigo gained its reputation as an innovative and progressive imprint by promoting the work of British scriptwriters, who were hailed as true author figures, despite the inherently collaborative nature of the mainstream comics industry. In a manner reminiscent of “auteur theory”, writers such as Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison developed attractive author personas which they consistently displayed through interviews, letter columns or social media, but also, more importantly, by inserting their avatars within the comics they scripted. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that their work in fact simultaneously asserts and destabilizes writerly authority, in a manner that is consistent with Linda Hutcheon’s view of postmodernity. By multiplying author figures and playfully disseminating authority, Vertigo authors question their own authorial control over the text, asserting instead the crucial role played by the reader.

Showrunner as Auteur: Bridging the Culture/ Economy Binary in Digital Hollywood

Abstract This article engages the metaphor of showrunner as auteur to examine freedom of expression in television. News articles offer the metaphor of showrunner as auteur, with Hollywood journalists discussing the writer-producers of the new Golden Age of Television. Media convergence, including cable and digital technologies, has disrupted traditional TV organisations and power brokers, bringing about a renaissance. Jenkins (2006) challenges scholars to see media convergence in terms of voice and participation, rather than technology. Following Jenkins, this study engages auteur theory, and Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the medium and the message, to better understand TV showrunners. Critical insights from Marx and Bourdieu are considered with regard to the interplay of cultural and economic forces. The analysis compares earlier film directors-Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers-with showrunners of the cable and digital era, including David Chase, the Wachowskis, David Benioff, and Diablo Cody. Because of disruptive technologies, TV showrunners are able to break free from media restraints and bridge the culture/economy binary that structures TV as a field of production. No longer bound by broadcast censorship and scheduled programming, TV showrunners are producing shows that express their signature messages, transforming TV into a cinematic experience.

Re-conceptualizing Ingmar Bergman’s status as auteur du cinema

Why is it that some film directors become and remain central in the reception of their works and others do not? Classical auteur theory suggests the answer lies in the personality of the director. In this article, we explore and re-conceptualize the status of auteur du cinema Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director. In line with Dyer’s gap between the institution and the audience, we explore Bergman’s self-fashioning through his own published writings and compare this to what was written about him in the Swedish press between 1944 and 1983, his most active years as a film director. The result is an analysis of dominant and alternative cultural discourses concerning Bergman’s authorship that facilitates an exploration into the corresponding interpretative strategies located in the audience. Here, Bergman’s status as popular celebrity in Sweden contributes to a paradoxical image – and recognition – of the high-art auteur, not in the least through his own myth-making.

Videoclip de autor. El concepto de cine de autor y su aplicación al estilo del vídeo musical

El cine de autor defiende la figura del director como centro creativo y núcleo del proceso fílmico. Dicho concepto se encuentra establecido en la Historia del Cine desde su surgimiento en la década de los cincuenta junto al movimiento de la Nouvelle Vague. Este fenómeno cinematográfico se adapta a las características del vídeo musical creando el videoclip de autor, definido como aquellos en los que se manifiesta el estilo del realizador en detrimento de otros factores de creación estética como el propio cantante o el tema musical que actúa como base. En este artículo se plantean los rasgos de dicha teoría extrapolables al vídeo musical y se muestran las similitudes e influencias entre el cine y el videoclip en cuanto al estilo y la personalidad artística. Los objetivos propuestos son la aplicación de los conceptos de autor y de estilo al vídeo musical, y de forma específica, la creación e implantación de la categoría de videoclip de autor para la mejora del estudio de este formato. La metodología utilizada se basa en la descripción y en la exposición objetiva de la teoría cinematográfica así como de las características del videoclip, y la posterior extrapolación y comparación entre ambas producciones audiovisuales. Se concluye la relación de las nociones de autor y de estilo con los rasgos propios del vídeo musical realizados por directores que plasman sus personalidades artísticas en estas creaciones que combinan imágenes y música con un gran efectismo y experimentación. Igualmente, se trata de poner en valor la figura del director clip de un modo equiparable al prestigio del director de cine.

American Biography: The Year in the US

American BiographyThe Year in the US Carl Rollyson (bio) Biography suffers from what I am going to call the significant subject syndrome. Choose to write about an American president, especially for a trade house or a prestigious university press, and you are automatically accorded due deference in The New York Times and other major publications. Over the last publishing season well-received biographies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, by John A. Farrell and Bob Spitz, join other recent presidential narratives of Grant and Nixon by Ron Chernow and Evan Thomas. The demand for such reassessment is insatiable. But even if the president is Calvin Coolidge—not one of the top-tier choices for biographers—you will find the book in an airport bookshop, as I did, when it was first published in 2013. What you will not find at the airport is Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, Alan K. Rode's splendid 2017 biography of Michael Curtiz, director of Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), and White Christmas (1954)—to name just four of his most famous, popular, and successful films. Coolidge is a priori considered more important (reviewed in The New York Times Book Review), while Curtiz is ignored. Who the subject is and who publishes the book outweighs the biography's quality or even its cultural importance. Might it be said that from a certain point of view Curtiz's contribution to the construction of American identity is as significant—or dare I say more significant—than Coolidge's? The University Press of Kentucky published the Curtiz biography, and that means the book will not be as widely distributed and reviewed as a trade book—no matter how diligent the publisher might be in sending out advance reading copies. A biographer of a film subject might have a better shot at a Times review and major distribution if, like James Curtis, he writes about Spencer Tracy, often considered the greatest male actor in Hollywood history, and the biography is published by the prestigious Knopf imprint. The pecking order is not just a matter of the publishing industry, or of media bias, but is also upheld by biographers too. A member of the New York University Biography seminar said to me when I told her I was writing a biography of Dana Andrews, a star of the 1940s: "Isn't he too small of a subject?" I [End Page 168] wish I had the wit then to say, "No, no small subjects. Only small biographers." A reviewer of my Rebecca West biography, Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl, marveled that someone who could write a biography about Marilyn Monroe would turn to such an important literary figure. When I mentioned a long biography of Barbara Stanwyck, which was only the first volume, a biographer of political figures said to me flat out: "No actor is worth a thousand pages." And look who wins the awards. Rarely is it the biographer of a film figure unless the subject is someone as hallowed and controversial as Orson Welles. Some major newspapers—notably The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post—do in fact review books like Rode's Curtiz biography. In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, noting the hundred plus films Curtiz directed, including ninety-four at Warner Brothers, which defined his dazzling pictorial technique, identifies why until now there has been no biography of the director and why Rode's biography, "thoroughly researched," is so important: "You never got the sense Curtiz felt some kinds of films were more important than others." In short, the director was devoted to film, not to the subjects of film, just as a student or reviewer of biography ought to be concerned with biography, not just the subject of that biography. Curtiz did not fit the "auteur theory." He did not author films, imposing his vision on them, but instead surrendered himself to the script and brought to it his compositional genius. As Scott Eyman puts it in The Wall Street Journal, Curtiz's camera was "an active participant, a searcher after crucial emotional moments, making for a dynamic style that was a strong influence on the young...

The pain in Spain: an analysis of horror auteur Jaume Balagueró’s films

Contemporary Spanish horror auteur Jaume Balagueró’s films are animated by thematic motifs that surround traditionally marginal ‘Others.’ This study focuses on Balagueró’s more recent works, which include three films in the [·REC] series and Mientras Duermes. Specifically, this study reads Balagueró’s film symptomatically, drawing on auteur theory and the horror genre as well as its relation to Spain. The psychoanalytically inflected concept of the Monster teases out the films’ sociopolitical symptoms that surround traditionally marginalized people (immigrants, women, children). The ‘archaic mother’ and ‘final girl’ further flesh out the sociopolitical meanings around Balagueró’s conjuring of zombies and viruses. The analysis also encompasses Balagueró’s relation to the ‘found footage’ horror sub-genre and his male characters’ lack of ‘phallic sufficiency.’ While Balagueró’s work can be interpreted as tacitly right-wing (despite channeling strong doubts about male authority), the films present one moment within a larger sociopolitical national discourse. That is, Balagueró’s films do not perform a simple ‘mirror’ function – even as they are deeply embedded in Spain today.

Theory of Origin

This article reviews the traditional auteur theory within film and television studies, looking at how notions of the author and authorship are constructed. It moves through an overview of traditional auteur theory, highlighting its successes and failures as an academic theory. In reviewing the theory this article presents an alternative and hopefully more productive way in which to analyse and decipher notions of authorship. The new theory is tested by application to three distinct case studies involving the film director Tim Burton, singer Lady Gaga and the video-on-demand service provider Netflix.

Art, labor, and the market: Jacques Rivette and Maurice Pialat at Cannes

AbstractAuthors are creators; authors are also workers. Conventional understandings of film authorship, however, tend to privilege the former and obscure the latter. While hallowing film art and granting it a legitimacy equal to that of the other arts, the politique des auteurs, or auteur theory, had little concern for the realities of artistic labor and did not address the socioeconomic determinations that weigh on filmmakers. This article reconsiders film authorship in the light of its social and economic dimensions. Departing from a case study focusing on the 1991 main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, I will focus specifically on two French entries, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse and Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh. In these examples the festival selection displayed a predilection for films addressing the fragile and endangered condition of the artist. This renewed focus on the precarious status of the filmmaker as an artist subject to financial hardship and industrial constraint found a haven in the grand bastion of cinematic originality, the Cannes Film Festival. For this reason, these films have often been read as confirmations of widespread critical anxiety about the precarious state of film and film authorship. Upon closer consideration, though, the films themselves do not sustain the rhetoric of peril and endangerment. Instead they offer portraits of artists in their working milieu, the “studio” in Rivette and the art market in Pialat. Reflecting on the artistic means and economic ends of cinema, they urge critics and spectators not to reduce the dynamic of artistic creation to a phantasm and foreclose its economic dimension or its empirical reality as a function of human labor. Rivette’s and Pialat’s films allow us to reconsider the longstanding and spurious discursive opposition between art and labor, and to appreciate the ways in which film authors are also workers and, as such, subject to the laws of the market.RésuméLes auteurs sont des créateurs, mais aussi des ouvriers. La conception générale du cinéma d’auteur a tendance à privilégier le côté créateur en négligeant les règles de la profession. En élevant le cinéma au rang des arts, la politique des auteurs s’est dérobée aux facteurs socioéconomiques qui déterminent la production cinématographique et surtout a prêté peu d’attention à la réalité du travail artistique. Cet article se propose de réévaluer la notion de cinéma d’auteur à la lumière de ses dimensions socio-économiques. Pour ce faire, nous allons nous pencher sur la sélection officielle du Festival de Cannes de 1991, et en particulier sur deux films français en compétition, à savoir La Belle Noiseuse de Jacques Rivette et Van Gogh de Maurice Pialat. Ces deux entrées officielles témoignent de la prédilection du festival à sélectionner des films sur la condition fragile de l’artiste. Cet intérêt renouvelé pour le statut précaire de l’auteur de cinéma, victime des difficultés financières et des contraintes de l’industrie, a trouvé un vrai refuge dans le Festival de Cannes, le bastion par excellence de l’originalité. À force d’être sélectionnés en compétition, ces films ont souvent été interprétés comme des signes de l’angoisse de la précarité du cinéma d’auteur. Regardés de plus près, les films eux-mêmes ne reproduisent pas la rhétorique du danger et de la détresse, et offrent à la place des portraits d’artistes à l’œuvre au milieu du travail, soit à l’atelier dans le cas de Rivette, soit dans la communauté de marchands d’art dans celui de Pialat. Les films mettent en scène plutôt des artistes-travailleurs, en soulignant les moyens artistiques et économiques du cinéma. Critiques et spectateurs sont invités à contempler la réalité empirique comme fonction du travail humain et donc à ne pas réduire la dynamique de la création artistique à un phantasme. Les films de Rivette et Pialat nous permettent ainsi de revisiter la vieille et fausse opposition entre art et travail, et d’apprécier les divers moyens qui confèrent aux artistes le statut de travailleurs.

Laurence Olivier

Laurence Olivier Jennifer Barnes Henry V. 1944. Dir. Laurence Olivier. United Kingdom. Two Cities Films; Hamlet. 1948. Dir. Laurence Olivier. United Kingdom. Two Cities Films; Richard III. 1955. Dir. Laurence Olivier. United Kingdom. London Film Productions. In 1948 Laurence Olivier claimed that he could make a Shakespeare film “just as Shakespeare himself, were he living now, might make it” (Foreword 3). This statement refers specifically to the 1948 Hamlet but the connection between Olivier and Shakespeare is frequently evoked, too, in relation to Olivier’s other cinematic adaptations: Henry V (1944), Richard III (1955), and the unmade Macbeth. In this statement, Olivier asks us to read his own stylistic signature as constituting the equivalent of Shakespeare’s should the author be transmogrified into what would be later designated the cinematic auteur. Yet, appearing in the context of a foreword justifying the supposed liberties taken with Shakespeare’s play-text, it also stresses difference. In negotiating difference through sameness, Olivier’s justification of his “interpretation” of Hamlet ultimately asserts that Olivier’s visual stamp on the film is both analogous to Shakespeare’s imagined cinematic signature and specific to Olivier himself. In opening up a space for negotiation between the author and the director, Olivier anticipates Francois Truffaut’s attempts to reconcile les politiques des auteurs with the “problem of adaptation” (“Literary” n. pag.). For Truffaut, in the context of cinematic adaptation, fidelity to an original text cannot be made coherent through attempts at “invention without betrayal,” a method primarily associated with the detested cinéma du papa (“Tendency” 226). Instead, it is to be found in difference: in a privileging of the cinema and a “betrayal of the letter” where a dialogue takes place between the “spirit” of the original text/author and its adaptor, the auteur, as precisely “a man of the cinema” (229). Truffaut’s position is echoed in [End Page 487] 1962 by Andrew Sarris’s reincarnation of les politiques des auteurs as auteur theory. Here, Sarris understands interior meaning as emerging from a direct tension between a director’s personality and his material, what he dubs “an élan of the soul” (64). Like Olivier’s statement, then, both the European and the American traditions in which auteur theory develops foreground a kind of dialogue of spirit between the author/auteur as intrinsic to identifying an auteur adaptation. The suggested dialogue of spirit between, in this case, Olivier and Shakespeare is one that speaks directly to Olivier’s Shakespearean oeuvre and to his established place in a pantheon of great Shakespearean directors. It is reflected thematically and stylistically across all of his adaptations—where he functioned as writer, producer, director and principle actor—and it is consolidated by the fact that Olivier’s Shakespeare films are without exception intensely personal, exemplary of the subjective vision of the “man of the cinema” that Truffaut marries to the concept of the auteur. In short, approaching Olivier’s film adaptations through an awareness of his frequently cited “spiritual dialogue” with Shakespeare means focusing our attention on a wider relationship between the thematic and the personal that impacts the visual aesthetic of all three completed film texts. Indeed, it is in the uncovering of the complex relationship between the thematic, the stylistic, and the personal that the concept of “auteur Shakespeare” can be most productively applied to Olivier’s oeuvre. The central thematic preoccupation that underpins all of Olivier’s adaptations is the foregrounding within the film text of Olivier himself, not simply as actor and director but, emphatically, as “Shakespeare’s interpreter” (Olivier, On Acting 197). The thematic impetus to showcase Olivier in this way impacts meaningfully the visual aesthetic of all three films and also, as the screenplays attest, of the unmade Macbeth. Indeed, all of Olivier’s adaptations are characterized by a consistent mapping of theatrical space onto the cinematic mise-en-scène, a stylistic strategy that enables Olivier to activate early modern dramatic practices embedded in the play-text. By cinematically quoting the space of the early modern playhouse, Olivier takes advantage of the presentational nature of the play text in order to stress the significance of his extra-textual persona (and the authority of his...

Shakespeare and the Auteurs: Rethinking Adaptation through the Director’s Cinema

The introduction to this special issue uncovers the important role played by Shakespeare films in international cinema since lapolitique des auteurs . The essay historicizes both the circumstances of la politique and the legacy of the auteur theory, which sought to characterize the French movement’s impact on film production and especially reception after the 1950s. Arguing that auteurism—as a critique mainly of film adaptations of literature—constituted nothing less than an early form of adaptation theory/criticism, the essay explores four particular questions: 1) In what ways has auteurism impacted the critical and popular reception of filmic adaptations of literature?2) In what ways has the auteur Shakespeare film proved exceptional within this larger cinematic history of adaptations?3) How might reading particular Shakespeare films through the lens of the auteur theory help us to understand and appreciate them?4) Which scholarly methods should we prioritize in pursuing answers to these and other questions related to Shakespeare and the auteurs?In response to this final question, the essay offers three premises of auteur Shakespeare film study intended to facilitate future research on the topic.

The Shakespearean Auteur and the Televisual Medium

In the wake offundamental shifts in television, programming and production have seen television creations which rival—even go beyond—standard cinema in scope, length and character development. This essay takes the distinctive approach of applying auteur theory to the small screen, exploring what understandings of the auteur might mean for a new era of television Shakespeare, and, as its case-study, considers the BBC’s Hollow Crown series. Characterized by a feature-film appearance, a multimillion pound budget, and an all-star cast, the series is exemplary of how television is now made; hence, the essay argues, the series needs to be investigated in relation to the most recent understandings of the medium. Central to this investigation is the way in which producer Sam Mendes’s vision imprintsitself upon each of the series’s four episodes, and the first part of the essay is accordingly concerned with his recognizable style and credentials as the series “showrunner.” However, Mendes’s is not the only auteurial stamp on the series, and the essay is equally concerned with how each of Mendes’s three co-directors places his or her auteurial signature on the Shakespearean source material in such a way as to lend each production a unique character. These individualized creative visions, the essay argues, unfold in concert with Mendes’s conceptualization of the series in its entirety. Ultimately, televisual auteurism is understood as a complex phenomenon that allows for more than one creative approach to be entertained.

Introduction: Comics and Modernism

Comics and modernism, it could be said, served to coproduce each other. Phillip Wegner notes that like its kin-form, film, mass-circulated newspaper comic strips “emerge in the late-nineteenth-century context of a nascent cultural modernism” (para. 4). Many modernist artists and critics, moreover, relied on these newer forms and technologies as a defining point of contrast, taking them as the detritus of a degraded commercial culture in opposition to modernist experimentation and expression. Irving Howe, defender of modernist ideals into the postwar period, characteristically argues in his 1948 essay “Notes on Mass Culture” that comic strips and Hollywood cinema alike “suppress the free play of the unconscious” (47): “comic characterization consists of persistent identification of each name with an outstanding personality trait” and that “[l]ike comic strips, though seldom so simply, movie stars also tend to become identified in the mass mind with one personality strand” (48). For Howe and many of modernism’s leading exponents, comics — not only newspaper strips but also the comic books arriving on American newsstands in the mid-1930s — function as modernism’s wretched Other. Not all modernists took such a dim view of comics, of course. In the US, litterateurs and cultural critics including Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, and e.e. cummings praised comics and cartoons as examples of a vibrant American folk culture or, to use Seldes’s formulation, the vernacular “lively arts.” Nevertheless, the view of comics as emblematic of a disreputable consumer culture prevailed, even as film acquired cultural legitimacy, thanks largely to the dominance of the fundamentally modernist auteur theory found in influential midcentury film journals such as Cahiers du cinema. And yet Michael Wood, in an essay on modernism and film, points out that despite the temptation “to argue that all films are Modernist, that the cinema itself is an accelerated image of modernity,” the medium has demonstrated a “yearning to become the twentieth century’s version of the nineteenth century’s novel” by consistently

The creative process of The Beatles revisited

Much of both popular and academic writing about creativity in popular music has been characterized by a conflict between commercial production and artistic creativity. On the one hand, creativity has been explored with reference to the large-scale structure of the popular music industry. On the other hand, much of the writing has been based on a Romantic or individualist notion of creativity, explicit for example in the auteur theory. This line of writing has certainly been popular with respect to The Beatles. Drawing on recent research on creativity in popular music and organizational research, the article challenges this dichotomy by focusing on the interaction between individual creativity and different forms of collaborative creativity in the production of The Beatles’ records.

Film Award Choices

Three sources—domain experts, consumers, and professional film critics—engage in the recognition and validation of cinematic excellence. Each signals its approbation with awards, ratings, reviews, and lists of the best. Notwithstanding a generous body of research, congruence among these sources remains unclear. For example, research findings show the influence of critics’ reviews on box office receipts—consumers—vary from strong to nil. Some studies report similarities in critics’ and consumers’ cinematic taste; others report differences. This article seeks a clarification of one facet of the role of critics in the recognition of cinematic excellence by comparing critics’ film award choices—not their ratings—with Oscar awards, in four categories: best actor, actress, director, and film. For each pair of award categories, chi-squares were performed on cross-classifications of the frequency of critics’ choices matching Oscar’s. Cramer’s V sheds light on auteur theory, actress–actor differences, and coat-tail effects of best film awards.

Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007) and Beyond the Hills (2012): Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu and the paradoxes of ‘anti-national national cinema’

Abstract This discussion of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s internationally circulated ‘popular highbrow’ films – 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile/Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007); and Dupa dealuri/Beyond the Hills (2012) – is grounded in the auteur theory. In particular, the analysis telescopes in on the thematic motif of surveillance that animates the two films. At the same time, on a Foucauldian view, the motif plays out in distinct forms in each cinematic text. In Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, surveillance in the late Ceaus¸escu-era is depicted as gaining expression through the internalized discipline of the monadic subject. In contrast, in the contemporaneous Beyond the Hills, surveillance implicates the practices of the pure community convened in distinction to an exiled other. Psychoanalytic concepts (primal crime, return of the repressed) are also summoned to tease out the social tensions in the films. Mungiu’s work vigorously cross-­examines the official mythologies of national harmony; in other words, Mungiu may be construed as engaging with what Mike Wayne calls ‘anti-national national cinema’. However laudable the practice of socially conscious critical film is, auto-problematization of ‘peripheral’ nations may also bring reproduction of marginalization in its train when the films circulate internationally.

Milland Alone: The End of the System, Post-Studio Stardom, and the Total Auteur

After all these years I finally realized that the only thing I ever wanted to be in this business was a director.-Ray Milland (256)DESPITE ITS MANY COMPLICATIONS AND QUALIFICATIONS since the late Andrew Sarris introduced it to American readers in 1962, the "auteur theory" remains a central concern in film and media studies. Film festivals and art house programs continue to be organized around the auteur, and scholarly monographs and essays still largely attribute authorial intention to directors. Rather than embracing the new independent era of 1950s and 60s US film, however, Sarris's influential mistranslation of the Cahiers du Cinema "politique des auteurs" (1957) looked back with nostalgia to the film-makers of the studio era, where talented directors wrangled with subpar material to make great films out of the "tension between the director's personality and his material," the tension between art and commerce ("Notes" 7). Such a conflict also animated French concerns with the politique (better translated as "policy" or "politics"). In Andre Bazin's early critique of the politique, he notes the absurdity of this kind of definition of film authorship: "[paradoxically, the supporters of the politique des auteurs admire the American cinema, where the restrictions of production are heavier than anywhere else" (257). Bazin prefers the "genius of the system" as a way of explaining exceptional films made under the heavy control of Flollywood studios (258). For Sarris, on the other hand, the true auteur is the director who creates "interior meaning" through his struggle with studio assignments ("Notes" 7).The post-studio era, however, poses a different problem, even though the very notion of the auteur emerged during this time. Following the end of dominant studio practices such as block booking and vertical integration, a change initiated by the US Supreme Court's 1948 decision in the Paramount case, the rise of independent production saw the emergence of the star-director or star-producer and, later, the arrival of New Flollywood directors, who could exert more control over their work by fulfilling multiple creative roles on their films. As Paul Monaco notes, "[b]y 1960, it was already a well-established practice that studios worked with stars to finance movies, while stars increasingly called themselves producers and set up independent companies" (20). Critics such as Denise Mann have examined the impact this transition had on production and film authorship, but her work largely celebrates what might be termed "heroic" protagonists (artists bucking an oppressive system) and charts the ways in which these new filmmakers explicitly foregrounded the entertainment business in their films of the post-studio period. Lost in the shuffle of these many considerations of the post-studio era is the plight of longtime studio actors, who suddenly found themselves without contracts, struggling to navigate the new world of independent production. Unlike younger stars, such as Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, who moved easily into this new economic and industrial environment and founded successful production companies, older stars had to trade on known identities to remain relevant. For some, like John Wayne, this brought success, but for others it presented a problem.Former Paramount player Ray Milland's post-studio career provides an interesting insight into how many former studio stars may have responded to their new roles. Flow did this studio star end up working for a Poverty Row studio a mere ten years after winning an Academy Award for The Lost Weekend (1945)? Milland's case is particularly Interesting in light of his own attempt to control and manage his image and career in the wake of the studio break-down. Importantly, although he did reasonably well transitioning to television work, he also began directing films in the mid-1950s, serving in multiple creative roles (star, director, and producer), as many other actors began doing. …

Visualizing Islamic Law and Values in Semerah Padi (1956): P. Ramlee as Cinematographic Auteur

In film studies, the Auteur Theory is mainly employed to explore film directors’ signature styles in creating their mastery artifacts. Individual style of a director in filmmaking is based on his/her preferences; genre, theme, mise-en-scéne, cinematography or even casts line-up. Grounded by American auteur scholar, Andrew Sarris's idea of ‘how’ in style and techniques a director conveys ‘what’ in film storytelling, this paper looks at P. Ramlee's cinematographic style in expressing Islamic notion in his 1956 film, Semerah Padi. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on the film in order to identify P. Ramlee's cinematographic tendencies and by taking up a semiotics approach; the researcher interpreted and discussed his distinctive style as an auteur statured filmmaker.