The auteur, it is commonly assumed, is a director - Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, John Cassavetes, Zbig Rybczynski - of films that may or may not achieve popular success but that are decidedly artistic and sometimes difficult. Phillips comes to this study of David Lean with two distinct biases: a deep admiration for Lean's films, which I share, and a conviction that Lean as a director was an "auteur." That French term, which derives from the Latin for "author," has been used by Andrew Sarris and other critics to make the argument that certain film directors are in fact the authors of their films - that even though film is an essentially collaborative process controlled by producers and studios, these directors place their stamp on their films so indelibly that no one else could have created them, just as no one except, say, Charles Dickens could have written his own novels.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |