Film Authorship: Auteurs And Other Myths

by C.P. Sellors

Few topics in the study of film produce as much controversy as authorship. Critics, historians, and theoreticians heatedly debate film authors, arguing vociferously about the nature of film authorship and questioning whether films even have authors at all. "Film Authorship" evaluates these debates in a rigorous and accessible manner. Generously illustrated, the book analyzes the historical development and theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of film authorship and the auteur. It then examines recent theories of film authorship and proposes a reconceptualization that grounds the topic firmly in empirical analyses of film production.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2010

Reviews

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Sellors explains in the introduction of Film Authorship: Auteurs And Other Myths, he is not necessarily challenging the notion of the auteur in principle, rather he is arguing against, "the assignment of the director as auteur as a critical accolade rooted in the critic's personal preferences" (5). Seelors develops this thesis throughout the book by arguing that the auteur theory is far too easy. Later, Sellors crystallizes his position by stating, "Identifying who is and is not a member of the authorial team of any film is essentially an empirical and critical exercise relying on the best available evidence, rigorous interpretation of this evidence, and coherent reasoning and argumentation, and is always open to refinement and challenge" (126). While this may seem self-evident, Sellors works from the assumption that critics and audiences alike are too quick to ascribe authorship to a film's director while ignoring (perhaps unintentionally, at least, on the casual audience member's part) the collective nature of filmmaking. This is not, however, to assume that films are without authors, because "Within the production collective is an authorial collective" (124). By Sellors' account, this notion of an authorial collective is a far more nuanced way of conceptualizing film authorship.

Sellors successfully argues against a fashionable way to think about film authorship. By doing so, he encourages readers to "abandon mythical and romanticized views of authorship" (126). The mythical and romanticized view of film authorship is, as Sellors speculates, the product of literary scholarship that naturally permeated over into film scholarship, and like literary scholarship, film scholarship too must grapple with the ideologies, biases, and oversimplifications that have shaped and defined it.