TASK 7: Role Allocation

I will now identify who is doing what role in the production team.



Written by: Harriet Matthews
Cinematography by: Jamie Stanton
Edited by: Harriet Matthews
Music by: Jamie Stanton
Produced by: Harriet Matthews
Directed by: Jamie Stanton




In film criticism, the 1950s-era auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an industrial process, the author's creative voice is distinct enough to shine through all kinds of studio interference. In some cases, film producers are considered to exert a similar "auteur" influence on films they have produced.
In law, the film is treated as a work of art, and the auteur, as the creator of the film, is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law, the film director is considered the author or one of the authors of a film.
Auteur theory has influenced film criticism since 1954, when it was advocated by film director and critic François Truffaut. "Auteurism" is the use of auteur theory to analyze films or to understand the characteristics that identify the director as auteur.
Auteur theory draws on the work of a group of cinema enthusiasts who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma and argued that films should reflect a director's personal vision. They championed filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean Renoir as absolute 'auteurs' of their films. Although André Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers, provided a forum for Auteurism to flourish, he explained his concern about its excesses in his article "On the Auteur Theory" (Cahier # 70, 1957). Another element of Auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen," which encourages directors to wield cameras as writers use pens and to guard against the hindrances of traditional storytelling.
Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that movie-making was an industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for, encouraging the director to use the commercial apparatus as a writer uses a pen, and, through the mise en scène, imprint his or her vision on the work (minimizing the role of the screenwriter). Recognizing the difficulty of reaching this ideal, they valued the work of directors who came close.